There and Back Again
by Ally147
Summary: "I'm not asking you to be better right now," he implored softly. "And I'm not asking you to change overnight. I'm just asking you to come with me." D/Hr, Post-Hogwarts AU, EWE. Written for the 2014 HP Mental Health Fest on LJ.
1. Chapter 1

This story was written for the HP Mental Health Fest over on LJ. The mental health issues this story deals with are anxiety and depression. Thank you to kanames_harisen for the beta job; she did wonderfully :)

This story is complete, and will be posted as I complete minor edits to the chapters, meaning if you read this during the fest, some parts might be a little different.

**Disclaimer**: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.

**Warnings**: This story is a parallel narrative to the novels/films that presents Hermione's time at Hogwarts, which allows me to weave in some minor D/Hr moments, and also means that some moments that were significant in the novels/films are not significant here, and some significant moments may be glossed over and simplified. Also, we're assuming that Muggle-borns are something of a commodity, and that the racism Hermione faces is quite a bit worse than what is presented in the novels/films. Content wise, centers depression and anxiety and leans more towards the conditions themselves, then ends with hints at future treatment. Also, the characters, to fit the story and the prompt, are quite OOC, but I've tried to weave in most of the character traits from the books. Story is also canon through to DH, but EWE, with the biggest canon change being that there was no romance or crushes between Ron and Hermione. Ever.

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When Hermione Granger received her Hogwarts letter, her initial reaction had been one of shock and utter disbelief. Surely the tall, austere Scottish woman was having her on. A witch? Hermione had never heard anything more ludicrous in her life.

After all, what sort of world would she be living in where basics taught to children the world over were thrown out the window without a care, to make room for _magic_, no less? The idea of it was absurd, and Hermione had told the odd woman as much. The woman, Professor Minerva McGonagall, as it had transpired, simply gave a small, tight smile, and withdrew a long stick from the pocket of her strange robes. A wand, she had said, the primary tool of any witch or wizard.

At Hermione's scoff of disbelief and her parents' dubious glares, McGonagall waved her wand and turned the Grangers' mahogany coffee table into a pony and back again. To further reiterate her point, she then made the television float in mid-air, made the colour of their carpet change at random, and switched the clothing her parents were wearing, the difference in sizes dutifully accounted for. Hermione's jaw dropped, her father fell to his armchair, ruffling his floral skirt as he did so, and her mother fell to the floor in a dead faint. Hermione didn't feel much like she could question anything after that, though she supposed it went a long way to explaining the odd things that had happened around her as young child.

It was with shaking hands that Hermione finally took the letter from McGonagall. She read the first sentence over and over, but the words would not sink in.

_It is with great pleasure that we inform you that you have been accepted into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry_.

Hermione's blood ran cold with dread at the prettily inked words. While her grades in school were certainly above average, how on earth was she meant to keep up with a class of students who had a lifetime of experience in all things magic where she had none? She didn't know anything about magic! She would have denied its existence to the letter and argued rationality and logic in the face of anyone who dared to contradict her not even five minutes ago!

She looked up at the strange, older woman with wide, uncertain eyes. "I'm… a witch? A real witch?"

McGonagall nodded. "A Muggle-born witch," she confirmed, sounding almost proud. "You are really quite extraordinary, Miss Granger; witches and wizards born from Muggle parentage are quite rare."

"Well, what do I do now?" Hermione asked in a small voice. She turned over the paper and found her book and equipment list. She gaped at the list of obscure titles. "Where do I get all these books? _Standard Book of Spells: Grade One? Introductory Potions?_ I doubt very much that any of these titles would be available at Waterstones."

"Indeed, they are not." McGonagall regarded her with a small, knowing smile. "There is much to show you, Miss Granger."

Oh yes, there certainly was.

Diagon Alley felt otherworldly to her. Magic was so… common, a perfectly normal, everyday occurrence. It was so difficult to fathom this entirely new world working in perfect tandem with the other. How was it possible that such a place could exist without the rest of the world knowing?

Her parents drank in the sights with wide eyes and slack jaws; whatever Hermione had been feeling, she knew her parents were most likely having far more trouble reconciling this world with theirs than she was. After all, at eleven, nearly twelve years old, Hermione was nothing if not adaptable, but both Dr. Grangers had been walking this earth for forty-three years each. The mere existence of this place probably turned their entire working understanding of the world at large on its head.

The first upside that she would happily acknowledge was the bookstore. While it held none of her favourite authors like Austen or Dickens, she was certain that she would never be left wanting. There was a title for every topic imaginable, ranging from the various magical remedies for different skin ailments to the care and breeding of domesticated manticore. Hermione had taken one look at that particular title and its moving cover photograph and cringed, thinking that anyone who believed that a manticore _could_ be domesticated was severely lacking in the head.

Her absolute favourite part of the day, however, had been the visit to Ollivanders for her wand. It felt like she had tried half the wands in the shop – destroying windows, vases, a desk and a cash register in her quest – before she found her match; vine wood, dragon heartstring core, ten and three-quarter inches, embellished with a pretty vine pattern along the handle. The moment she had grasped that wand in her hand, it felt as though a rush of something warm and electric had shot from somewhere deep within her to her fingertips and, all of a sudden, a beautiful cascade of red and gold sparkles had flown forth from the tip.

They capped off the day in a manner perfectly befitting it - with ice cream. Florean Fortescue had every flavour imaginable in his little shop. It was there that, over Hermione's massively elaborate banana split and her parent's small dishes of vanilla, McGonagall had deigned to warn Hermione of the bigotry that abounded in the Wizarding world.

"The majority of this world is firmly rooted in archaic, pure-blood tradition," she had warned them in a low, wary tone, as though she believed that those sitting around them might be listening. "Stupidly, of course," she reassured her horrified parents. "I don't know how we expect to advance if we remain so entrenched in the past. Some Muggle-borns find it… difficult to adjust to such conditions."

"What are you suggesting, Professor?" Hermione's mother, Eleanor, had asked.

McGonagall sighed, pushing the thin wire frames of her glasses further up her nose. "Only that I hope your daughter is as strong as she appears."

"And if she isn't?" her father, Michael, interjected sharply.

"_She_ can speak just fine for herself, you know," Hermione muttered around a mouthful of banana.

McGonagall squared her shoulders and drew herself up, looking the very potentate of authority. "Then rest assured, I will assist her in any way possible."

When they returned home from Diagon Alley, Hermione shut herself in her room and pored over her new books. She drank in titles like _Hogwarts: A History_ and _A History of Magic_, wanting to know everything there was to know about this strange new world opening up to her. She read her new textbooks front and back, memorising the incantations and learning the required wand movements with a length of bamboo taken from the trussing of her mother's tomato plants.

Excitement began to bubble inside her as time crawled closer to the beginning of term. She was certain she hadn't gotten a wink of sleep the night of August 31st, more content to pack her trunk, then decide it needed rearranging, then pack it again. The wonder that came with handling all her new things, like her cauldron and her potions scales, was no less significant now than it had been when she had made the purchases. Even her well-read and worn copy of _The_ _Daily Prophet_, with its cramped articles, topsy-turvy headlines and fascinating moving pictures, still invited temptation to stare.

Platform 9 ¾ had been an ordeal. Hermione had hidden behind a pillar and watched as family after family barreled headlong into the divide between platforms nine and ten. Her parents saw nothing; Hermione deduced that there must have been some sort of charm on the portal to keep the non-magic folk from seeing. It had taken quite a bit of convincing to persuade her parents to follow her. Her mother grasped her hand while her father pushed her trolley, and together they squeezed their eyes shut and broke out into a sprint towards the wall. It felt like walking through a wind tunnel, and they emerged on the other side to the bustle of countless other children and their families.

The Hogwarts Express was a long, scarlet steam engine that wound around the tracks like a snake. It let out high-pitched whistles as loud as screams that droned out the hundreds, possibly even thousands of other conversations happening around them. In that moment though, Hermione was only aware of her mother holding her tight, her father running a soothing hand through her mass of curls, and the streaks of hot tears that ran down her cheeks.

"I'll write every day," Hermione sobbed into her mother's neck. "I promise!"

Her mother whispered comforting words into her ear and rubbed a hand up and down her back. "We'll miss you too, love."

"If you ever want to come home…" Her father let the sentence trail off, looking down at her meaningfully.

Hermione pulled out of her mothers' arms and rubbed her reddened eyes, shaking her head stubbornly as she did so. "I won't, but I know; I'll write home right away." She turned and stared at the train. "I guess I should hop on now," she said in a small voice.

Her parents helped her take her bags aboard, and with a final hug and kiss from them both, they left her without them for the first time in her life, on a train headed to a magical boarding school in Scotland. She shook her head and giggled at the absurdity of that thought, regardless of its accuracy.

The first person she met on the train was a round-faced, friendly looking boy named Neville Longbottom. He had been sitting alone in a cabin with a large toad perched upon his knee. He chatted to her at length over the journey, talking about his stern grandmother, how for the longest time he didn't think he'd even get into Hogwarts since his first incident of accidental magic had only occurred the year before, and how nervous he was to be beginning his schooling at Hogwarts, as he had very little confidence in his magical abilities. Hermione was delighted to have made a friend so soon, and one that she could relate to, too! She even agreed to help him find his pet toad, Trevor, when he went missing some time later.

The first thing she saw on exiting the train when it pulled up at what she was told by Neville was Hogsmeade Station, was the largest, hairiest man she had ever seen in her life. He boomed loudly for the first year students to follow him, and he led them to a series of small boats on a flat, black lake, the sliver of moon in the sky reflected perfectly in its glassy surface. They were apparently charmed to take them up to the castle as the oars moved through the water of their own accord, slow, steady and rhythmic.

The Hogwarts castle was doubtlessly the most splendid structure she had ever seen with her own eyes; it was like the castles in all her favourite medieval novels come to life. The high spires, tall towers and rustic stones immediately evoked images in her of fire-breathing dragons guarding immense treasures, of trapped princesses and valiant princes, of powerful kings and queens holding over courts, and of foolhardy, yet brave knights and men on quests to vanquish evil.

The interior was just as impressive, all long, winding corridors, huge framed portraits that actually greeted them as they walked, high enchanted ceilings that showed the outside sky and a path throughout aided by firelight; she supposed she had never really considered whether or not a magical school would use Muggle things like electricity, but the lit torches that lined the hallway from their sconces made the cavernous school far more atmospheric than anything fluorescent would have.

The Sorting Ceremony was odd to watch from the perspective of someone who had never experienced it, or even heard of it. Children were called forth and guided to sit upon a little stool at the front of the hall, and an old, wizened hat was placed upon their heads. Sometimes the hat could take upwards of ten minutes to Sort a person, other times it barely had to hit their head at all.

She wasn't sure what to expect when she had finally been called forth. She inched her way closer to the stool, sat down and, with an encouraging quirk of the lips from McGonagall, the hat suddenly covered her head. She had to keep herself from jumping into the air when the hat actually began to whisper in her ear, and from its little mutterings, it seemed to very seriously consider her suitability for all four houses. It spoke of her ambition and determination, her intelligence and quiet nature, her loyalty and kindness, and her bravery and fortitude. She had to admit, she was rather surprised to have been Sorted a Gryffindor in the end. From what she had read about the other houses, Hermione had felt certain she would be Sorted a Ravenclaw.

The Gryffindors were a warm and friendly bunch. As she moved to sit at the long table, followed by a proud smile from McGonagall, she was met with handshakes and welcomes aplenty. She clapped along with them as each new student was added to the house.

Her first night in the castle was spent hunched over her new books under her blankets. One of the prefects showed her how to cast a _Lumos_ charm so she'd be able to read at night without disturbing her dorm-mates, a tittering group of girls whose conversations took so many turns Hermione barely knew what they were talking about. They seemed nice enough, Hermione supposed, and polite, too, but it was obvious from the first awkward five minutes spent in their presence that the likelihood of friendship blossoming between them would be rather low.

Her first day of classes was a nerve-wracking affair. Her first lesson was Potions, a branch of magic which didn't really differ greatly from Muggle chemistry. It was also a lesson shared with the Slytherins. She was paired up with Neville, and with their combined nervousness and his fear, they were the butt of many a joke.

"A Squib and a Mudblood!" a nameless Slytherin had hissed lowly from the bench behind them. "What in Merlin's name was Snape thinking when he paired the two of you up? Surely not that he'd still have a classroom to teach in by the end of the day!"

She heard the word 'Mudblood' daily, sometimes more so. She didn't know what it meant, but she assumed it was an insult of some sort, as it was always said with scorn and fervor, and not always by the Slytherins as she might have guessed. At least a quarter of the time it was said by haughty looking Ravenclaws, and the occasional 'holier-than-thou' Hufflepuff, too. It was usually accompanied by a sneer and a look of utter contempt that served to make her feel so incredibly small. Thankfully, Gryffindor House didn't appear to deal in the same sort of pure-blood vitriol as the others.

She wasn't sure she liked the word 'Muggle' either. For a general descriptor of 'those without magic', it was always said in such a derisive, condescending tone: "You're Muggle? How very quaint." For a world that felt so very advanced, the prolific racism that abounded, especially amongst children, shocked her. She hated the stares she received from people who told her what a bright and accomplished witch she was, only to have them immediately change their minds when they found out what sort of blood she carried.

Charms and Transfiguration came slightly more easily than the other subjects, and she liked to think she did rather well at it. Hermione put this down to her innocent wonder of what she was witnessing, and the joy she felt to be the cause. There was little to contain the childlike glee that had welled up in her the first time she had successfully levitated a feather, regardless of the fact that she had first successfully accomplished that feat at five o'clock in the morning after spending almost the entirety of the previous evening in a near perpetual, not to mention frustrating, state of trial and error. As it turned out, waving a piece of bamboo and reading an incantation from a book without truly knowing if the movements or pronunciation was correct was not a particularly conducive method to learning magic.

It wasn't an entirely uncommon occurrence for Hermione to fall asleep in the library, to be found by Madam Pince early the following morning. Nights spent studying in the depths of the library were the norm, and the notion of sleeping in her own bed became a distant memory. She often saw her fellow Muggle-born student, Justin Finch-Fletchley, having his own marathon study sessions, too. Sometimes she would join him, but not always.

She was teased regularly for her dedication and her presumed nerdish tendencies, and was known to most of her housemates as the resident 'bookworm'. But what choice did a Muggle-born have but to study with such fervor? She walked into every lesson blind, and as soon as she had mastered one thing, another three things took its place. And with that came the myriad of doubters who had no qualms whatsoever in telling her that perhaps she didn't quite belong at Hogwarts if she couldn't keep up with the workload.

The first Halloween in Hogwarts had been torturous, a culmination of little thing upon little thing until everything exploded, and Hermione wasn't sure she could take it anymore. All at once, everything began to fall apart, that stupid git Ronald Weasley and his stupid, thoughtless comments being the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

Hours she spent in tears in the girls' bathroom that day. Hours cursing her classmates for their innate magical abilities that they didn't have to work half as hard as her to hone. Hours lamenting the fact that she was pants at making friends for herself. Hours wishing she could just forget everything she had seen and go home, back to her parents and her little Muggle primary school. She emerged from the stall, all out of tears to cry, wanting terribly to write a letter to her parents begging them to let her come home, only to find herself standing face-to-face with a hideous, grey-skinned troll.

But then, something wonderful happened.

It was laughable to her Muggle sensibilities that a troll was responsible for the greatest turnaround in her life at Hogwarts thus far. For a time, Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley were the lights in what she had otherwise thought to be a dark and dreary world for her. Despite their seemingly pathological aversion to anything even remotely sane, safe or rational, she finally felt as though she belonged when she was with them. With them, the teasing was a gentle ribbing, never intended to offend or mock, but to have her laugh along with them. In time, they became the best friends she had ever known. The only friends she had ever known.

With Harry and Ron by her side, her stress eased some. No longer did she eat alone or sit in the dark with her books, but it didn't make the spells come any easier. She still spent many a sleepless night in the library, but now she actually had friends who cared enough about her well-being to enquire after her when she came down to the Great Hall for breakfast the following morning looking quite obviously as though she hadn't slept a wink. The first time Harry had asked her if she was alright, she had started crying and flung her arms around his neck in a tight hug. Harry had spluttered a bit and patted her uneasily on the shoulder, muttering awkward platitudes into her hair. He explained to her some time later that that hug was the first instance of physical affection that he had ever received from a willing party (that he could recall, at least). At that, Hermione had promptly thrown her arms around his neck and cried again.

Her second year marked the opening of the Chamber of Secrets, and the unleashing of a monster in the school. The panic that gripped both students and staff at this time was staggering, and the air was thick with unease and anticipation. 'The Heir of Slytherin' was, funnily enough, widely regarded to be Harry, an accusation that had been regularly bandied about upon the revelation that Harry was a Parselmouth. Harry did all he could to refute those allegations, and privately believed that Draco Malfoy was the true heir.

And then, the attacks on Muggle-borns had begun.

Harry's insistence that it was Malfoy behind the attacks and threatening messages hit such a fever pitch that Hermione made a somewhat ill-advised suggestion; that she, Harry and Ron would infiltrate the Slytherin dormitories to personally interview Malfoy and catch him out while under the guise of the Polyjuice Potion. However, obtaining the recipe and the ingredients for such a restricted potion would require a certain amount of duplicity that both Harry and Ron were only too happy to go along with. Hermione was rather shocked by her own complicity, too. The rush of the rule breaking, the blatant thievery and the sheer _danger_ of the situation was pure adrenaline spiking in her blood, freeing her from her restraints.

They set up a cauldron and began the lengthy brewing process in a disused girls' lavatory on the first floor, which was inhabited by a particularly melancholic ghost named Moaning Myrtle. The ghost seemed to both revel in and deplore the new company they were offering her, but seemed mostly content to wail dramatically and splash at random at the far end of the stalls rather than interact with them for any great length.

Before long, the potion was complete and ready to use, but required one, final ingredient to be added to the viscous, muddy liquid before consumption. Hermione had had her sample ready to go since that infamous night at the Dueling Club, where Harry had unknowingly revealed himself as a Parselmouth when Malfoy conjured a snake. It was a hair belonging to Millicent Bulstrode, a heavy-set, brutish Slytherin girl who stood head and shoulders taller than many of their classmates.

She decanted the potion carefully into little vials and handed them to Harry and Ron, where they added their hairs to the mix and retreated to individual stalls. Hermione added hers, too, and the potion began to bubble and turn a nasty shade of yellow. It slid thick and unpleasant down her throat when she tipped it down, and tasted faintly of bile. Her skin began to prickle, then itch, then burn, and she looked down with horror at her hands as they sprouted a thick layer of soft, fluffy fur.

She ran her hands through her hair and stifled a scream when she came upon a pair of highly sensitive, twitchy ears. Moving her hands further down, she encountered two sets of wiry whiskers sprouting from high upon her cheeks, and a small, damp nose. A quick run over her mouth from her now very rough tongue confirmed long teeth that were sharp and pointed. She realised then with absolute horror that the hair she had had not come from Millicent Bulstrode at all, but from a pet cat!

When Harry and Ron asked her what was taking her so long, she had immediately stilled and squeaked, telling them in no uncertain terms to go on without her. Though the book had said the potion should not be used for animal transformations, she saw no logical reason why it wouldn't last the usual hour before it would wear off.

She had been wrong, though. Hermione had spent weeks in the hospital wing downing potion after potion to recover from her mishap. One good thing that had come of the whole debacle was that they now knew that Malfoy wasn't the Heir of Slytherin, and hadn't had a thing to do with the Chamber opening, despite his proclamation that he wished he had.

Months wore on and more Muggle-borns (and one ghost) fell before Hermione felt she had the answer. It had taken multiple overnight stays in the library, but after skimming through tome after tome, she encountered a chapter in _Most Macabre Monstrosities_ on the Basilisk, also known as the King of the Serpents. It was able to kill a person just with its gaze, but if its gaze was encountered in a reflection, then the victim would instead be petrified. Most importantly, too, it was renowned for its ability to squeeze through plumbing. It all added up perfectly; why Harry was the only one who could hear it, why it hadn't been seen, why spiders were fleeing the castle, and why there had been no deaths. Those unfortunate enough to be petrified hadn't encountered its gaze directly.

Excitedly, she had torn the pertinent page from the book and scribbled the word 'pipes' on the bottom, so she wouldn't forget. From her tin quill case, she transfigured a hand mirror, using it to guide her way around corners. On her way back from the library, she ran into Penelope Clearwater, a sixth-year Muggle-born prefect from Ravenclaw. Hermione explained what she had found, enthusiastically brandishing her torn page, when they rounded the next corner and saw in the mirror a pair of large, malevolent golden eyes. Her body gasped for breath and seized tight, and she toppled over into unconsciousness. She remained in the hospital wing for the remaining two and a half months of the school year.

Needless to say, that it turned out to be little Ginny Weasley that had opened the Chamber, set the Basilisk out and wrote the ominous messages in blood on the walls, acting unknowingly as a conduit for Voldemort himself, was the last thing Hermione would have expected.

What she never told Harry or Ron was that she actually remembered her time being petrified rather well. It was a difficult sensation to describe – consciousness was there, just out of reach, but she experienced it all the same. She remembered the sensation of Harry's hand on hers, their voices in her ears, the scent of flowers, chocolates and sweets that piled up on the table beside her, and the tickling in her hand and the excitement in their tones when Harry finally found the page she had been clutching.

There was another voice that was familiar too, but that she couldn't place. It spoke in low, murmuring tones, and always late at night when she was tired, so she only really remembered snatches of those one-sided conversations.

"_You'd better get well soon, Granger; I score the highest marks now that you're stuck in here, and by quite the margin, too. It's a rather dull affair without the competition."_

"_Nobody puts their hand up in class anymore, Granger. The professors don't know what to do with themselves. You simply must wake up; for the sake of the professors and their rapidly deteriorating sanity, of course."_

"_I overheard Pomfrey telling your two lapdogs that she thinks you might be able to hear them when they talk to you. If you can, and since I doubt I'll ever be able to say this to you while you're awake, I'll tell you now. I'm sorry I called you a Mudblood, Granger."_

"_My mother used to read me fairytales when I was ill. Wizarding fairytales, of course, none of your fanciful Muggle nonsense. My favourite was _The Fountain of Fair Fortune_. When I was five, my mother and I went to see the pantomime production of it that they put on in Diagon Alley at Christmastime. Father was so angry when he found out. He hated the story, you see, and actually tried to get it banned. I still read it now, whenever I fall ill. It makes me feel better. I don't know if you know many Wizarding stories, but I thought you might like this one."_ The boy cleared his throat, and she heard a rustling of pages. _"'_High on a hill in an enchanted garden, enclosed by tall walls and protected by strong magic, flowed the Fountain of Fair Fortune…'_"_

"_Magically induced sleep seems to be a common theme in your Muggle fairytales, as does the notion that such a thing could be undone by a simple kiss. As if it could be that easy!"_ There had been a firm, clumsy pressure to her lips, gone as soon as it had appeared, then a pause and a sigh. _"See? Nonsense."_

Cracks in hers, Harry's and Ron's tight friendship began appearing in their third year. While much of her stress that year could be attributed to her use of a Time-turner and her full schedule of classes, the apparent death wish Harry had wasn't helping matters. It was absolutely beyond Hermione how Harry would accept a broomstick from an anonymous donor without any thought of where or who it might have come from. He knew that Sirius Black was after him. Heck, he knew there were probably a lot of people after him. Hermione understood that it was a good and highly sought after broom, but was she really the only one to suspect that it might have been tampered with? After all, it couldn't just be a coincidence that Harry would randomly receive a very expensive, top-of-the-line broom only days after his last one had been destroyed.

There hadn't been a second thought in her mind when she told McGonagall about Harry's mysterious broom. Despite every splutter from Ron to the contrary, Hermione knew she had done the right thing. That insistence was cold comfort though, when both boys began to studiously ignore her, and she found herself almost exactly where she began three years ago.

In that time, Crookshanks was a wonderful source of comfort. She could wrap her arms around the indignant-looking feline and bury her face in his fluffy hair and feel the most incredible sense of peace. Hermione didn't know if it was wishful thinking or craziness, but she often thought that Crookshanks was quite intuitive, and somehow more than he appeared. He would look at her with his expressive golden eyes, and she could swear he was looking into her very soul.

Her third year also marked what she (and many other Gryffindors who later heard the tale) held to be something of a milestone moment; upon hearing him heaping insults onto Hagrid to his friends, so loudly she was certain it wasn't a coincidence, she smacked Draco Malfoy right in his smarmy, arrogant little face.

Malfoy was a strange one. She didn't know much about him, other than that he was Slytherin, pure-blooded, excessively egotistical, deviously intelligent and quite pointy, yet he seemed oddly insecure. He was strange in that his more biting remarks came, more often than not, when he was playing for a crowd and in front of his 'friends', never on the odd occasions that they were alone. His eyes followed her everywhere she went, and whenever he did have her cornered, his taunts were always aimed at her physical features; comparisons of her hair to a bird's nest, suggestions that perhaps she was related to beavers given her large front teeth, how a head so small could house a brain so large. She wasn't sure if she should be overly offended by those remarks or not, but they were certainly a refreshing change to 'unworthy Mudblood', which even now still remained a firm favourite among the more elitist who still insisted on insulting her.

Summer holidays at home that year were oddly tense. While her parents had previously been indulgent of her ramblings on all things magic, something had changed. Not that Hermione could say she blamed them; she didn't know how she would react if she had a daughter who sent her multitudes of tear-stained letters detailing just how difficult everything was at school, not to mention only the vaguest mentions of how she was bullied mercilessly, just enough to make them worry. And those letters barely even covered all the near-death experiences she'd had!

Hermione didn't blame her mother when she begged her to stay home. She had almost been tempted when her mother offered to enrol her in the arts school in the next town where she could continue her piano studies, like she had wanted to before she found out she was a witch. It had led to a loud, long drawn out argument where Hermione had steadfastly refused to come home, declaring that she had not come this far just to walk away now. She and her mother did not trade anything more than idle small-talk for the remainder of the holidays, and it had been her father who had driven her back to Kings Cross Station for her fourth year in silence, and with the most disappointed and resigned expression on his face.

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**AN: **This is the first part in a two-part first chapter. The next part will be up in a couple of days once I'm done editing it. And Lucius Malfoy does indeed hate 'The Fountain of Fair Fortune'. From the Harry Potter Wikia: _Lucius Malfoy__, one of the __Hogwarts__ school governors as well as a __pure-blood__ supremacist, once attempted to have the story censored because it depicted a marriage between the __witch __Amata__ and the __Muggle __Sir Luckless__, which was utterly disagreeable to those wizards who were strongly prejudiced against Muggles. However, the __Headmaster __Albus Dumbledore__ adamantly refused, which then resulted in Lucius sending him several more letters and earning him Lucius' lasting enmity._


	2. Chapter 2

Hermione's fourth year was spent in much the same panicked state as her third. Harry's mysterious entry into the Triwizard Tournament, his subsequent squabble with Ron, and the mere thought of the death-defying tasks he would have to perform had her stressing so much that she was barely able to eat or sleep. The thought of Harry being out there with nothing and no one to help him made her sick to her stomach.

Her restless state was spent primarily in the library. Harry accompanied her on occasion, and they spent hours at a time poring over spells that might be of use to him. Though she would never admit as much out loud, she privately treasured these moments with Harry. He was the only person who could truly understand how separate from the Wizarding world she felt, as he had grown up much the same. She had told him the previous year about the fierce need she had to prove herself, and he had simply nodded and smiled, admitting that he often felt that way, too, but that being the 'Chosen One' meant that his lack of magical knowledge had been largely overlooked by Wizarding society, which in turn meant that he really did have something to prove. Not just to them, but to himself as well. He knew it wasn't a fair comparison, but he understood what she was going through just the same, and it made all the difference in the world.

On the occasions that Harry didn't accompany her, however, she felt herself being followed by a dark pair of eyes and heavily accented whispers.

Viktor Krum had been a confusing, wonderful enigma with a kind soul and a gentle personality. Rather than finding it annoying, she found his shy, broken English and soft vowels to be endearing, and his fruitless attempts to pronounce her name always made her smile. But those things didn't change the fact that she had absolutely no idea how to handle a boy, and an older one at that, showing interest in her. He touched her often, very casually and carefully; a brush of his fingers against hers, a tentative hand pushing her hair behind her ear, sometimes even a whisper against her temple when he pulled her with him into little nooks and alcoves to hide from the swarms of girls that plagued him. She blushingly accepted his attentions, even going so far as to give him her first kiss and accompany him to the Yule Ball, but when it became clear just how deep his affection for her ran, she knew she wouldn't be able to return it as she knew he would have liked. Instead, she treated him as she would a treasured friend, but still something a little more than Harry and Ron, and Viktor, ever the gentleman, accepted it with a smile, a gentle kiss to her cheek, and a promise to write her in the future.

It was during this year also that she properly learned of the use of house-elves within the castle. It had never really crossed her mind to ask how all their things were always so clean. She always assumed that the clean and pressed uniforms hanging in her wardrobe and fresh sheets on her bed at the beginning of each week came courtesy of paid cleaning staff, behind-the-scenes players that made the lives of the students at Hogwarts just that much easier. To learn that it was a plethora of magical elves who worked for nothing incensed her beyond all measure, as did her classmates' unwillingness to see things for what they really were. How was it that none of them could recognise the use of house-elves as being tantamount to slavery?

Thus, S.P.E.W. was born, and with it came ridicule the likes of which she hadn't experienced since her first and second years. She was told by many - including those she had come to see as friends and even Ron - that she obviously had no clue how things in the Wizarding world worked, that she was woefully ignorant of their customs and that even after four years, she still didn't understand and she probably never would. Looking back over the past few years, she would agree wholeheartedly with those assessments.

The holidays between fourth and fifth year were spent both at the Burrow with the Weasleys, and at Number 12 Grimmauld Place. She was both surprised and devastated when her parents never questioned her decision to leave after only spending a week with them.

At the outset of her fifth year, she had no idea if people were becoming more or less fearful in the wake of Voldemort's return. The Ministry wouldn't even entertain Harry's version of events from the graveyard that night after the tournament, where Cedric Diggory lost his life. They actively did all they could to keep the word from spreading and prevent an uprising in the Wizarding world, going so far as to position Dolores Umbridge into the school to keep both Harry and Dumbledore in line and further quash any more claims of Voldemort's return.

Hermione's opinion of the Ministry deteriorated rather quickly with Umbridge installed as the newest in a long, winding line of Defense professors, though she supposed it had never really been all that high to begin with; what sort of government would be so content to bury their heads in the sand, actively avoiding the issues that could well see their world fall to ashes around them? The unwillingness of the Minister of Magic to recognise what was happening and put the safety of his citizens first was unerringly infuriating, and made her question for the first time just what sort of people were in charge. She was certain that the Muggle Prime Minister, John Major, would never put the citizens of the UK at risk because of his own stupid hubris and ignorance.

Throughout the year, Harry had been having strange, recurring dreams of a long hallway, and a mysterious door that he couldn't identify. From what those dreams entailed, it was determined that what Harry was seeing weren't dreams at all, but were the result of a strange mental connection to Voldemort himself that hadn't yet been anticipated. Harry was immediately instructed in the art of Occlumency by Professor Snape in a series of lessons that Harry never elaborated on, but were ultimately unsuccessful, as it wasn't long after that that Harry was seeing visions of Sirius being tortured by Voldemort in the same mysterious room.

Of all the senseless, dangerous situations she had been involved in with Harry, the battle at the Department of Mysteries was the first that truly had her heart pounding in her throat and echoing through every part of her. It had been terrifying, infuriating and heart-wrenching all at once when it was discovered that the visions Harry had seen were merely a ploy to get him there. Sirius hadn't been there at all; it had all been an elaborate ruse to ensure that Harry would enter the Hall of Prophecies and find himself at a very particular location where he would find the orb containing the prophecy which pertained to himself and Voldemort. As soon as Harry had picked it up, a contingent of twelve Death Eaters had come forth from the shadows and held the group of them at wand-point. They had been there the whole time, waiting amongst the stacks for the moment to strike.

In the ensuing panic, it had been so difficult to know what was happening. They had run through the narrow halls, ducking the brightly coloured spells that flew overhead and turning for all too brief moments to send back their own. Somewhere in the scrimmage though, she found herself looking down Antonin Dolohov's wand, and a bright purple streak of something hot and sharp sliced down her chest and knocked her unconscious. She awoke some time later, after everything was over, and was told by Ron that the Order arrived as the duel moved to the Death Chamber, and that they lost Sirius to the Veil in there. She hadn't known Sirius well, but she knew enough to know that he was a good man, and that Harry had loved him dearly. She couldn't imagine how Harry was feeling at that moment.

Her parents had been tearful when she had come home for the holidays that year. Thanks to Madam Pomfrey, the slash down her chest had faded to a light pink scar, but the evidence of her umpteenth brush with death would forever remain. She had never felt more tempted to turn in her wand and leave Hogwarts than when her mother was on her knees and in tears at her feet, begging for her daughter to return home. She had been stubborn though, so close to the end that she could finally see the light at the end, and she knew that she could not return. Not yet, anyhow. Her parents' eyes had dimmed at that, and they gave her leave of them. They didn't even say goodbye when she packed her bag and headed to the Burrow.

In her sixth year, she found that this time it was her eyes that followed Draco Malfoy. Perhaps it was Harry's insistence that Draco had finally taken the Dark Mark that had her so curious, but she wasn't sure she believed that. There was a theory within the Order that the Dark Mark didn't stick unless you truly wanted it to, and that Voldemort didn't give it to just anyone; you had to prove yourself worthy of it. Draco Malfoy did not strike her as the sort of person who wanted to be branded, nor did he appear to be overly pleased with anything that was happening around him. He had lost weight, becoming even paler, and he looked suspicious of everyone.

She wasn't sure what compelled her to follow him around the castle, using Harry's Invisibility Cloak to keep herself from view. She followed him at least once a week, and every time, his journey ended at the Room of Requirement. She was bursting with curiosity as to what he was doing in there, and would sometimes stay for long minutes that bled into hours, running her hand over the stone wall as though she could feel what he was up to. Malfoy kept long hours in the room, often emerging looking frustrated and as though he had been crying. Every time though, he would glance over to where she was standing under the cloak. His eyes would linger, but he never said or tried anything. She didn't know if he knew she was there or not.

Late in the year, when Harry and Dumbledore had left the school on a mission of some sort, she was certain something would happen. The air was thick and tight with a thrum of nervous energy that set her on edge. She tried taking her copy of _Pride and Prejudice_ with her to the common room where she could read in front of the fire until she fell asleep, but even the usually relaxing and comfortable atmosphere was nothing against her agitation. She twitched and fidgeted, stood and sat, paced and paused before slamming her book down to the table in front of her with a frustrated huff. She stalked towards the closed portrait and hopped out into the darkened hallway; if anyone asked, she would be patrolling.

She hadn't had access to the Cloak that night – she assumed Harry had taken it – but in the dark it hardly mattered; Hogwarts was full of little nooks and crannies that one could conceal oneself in if one required it. And she was a witch, of course; she could use a Disillusionment Charm if she needed to.

She was surprised to find Malfoy quite quickly on her journey down from the tower. Unlike her, he was doing nothing to hide himself, wandering quickly through the halls without a worry for who or what might find him. She fell into step a good few metres behind him, ducking away when he turned and whipped his head around at every suspicious noise he heard. She had a feeling he knew she was following him, but she wasn't sure why he wasn't confronting her if that was the case.

She followed him all the way to the seventh floor. Another corner to turn and he'd be at the wall concealing the entrance to the Room of Requirement. Her eyes widened when he finally stepped into a beam of moonlight filtering in from one of the high, round-top windows, allowing her to see him properly; his upper lip and forehead were shining with perspiration, his cheeks and jaw were unshaven, his usually perfectly styled hair was messy and unkempt as he ran his hands through it repeatedly. He appeared to tremble too, and not from the cold. Draco Malfoy looked absolutely terrified.

She was so caught up in her study of him, she didn't see the suit of armour up ahead. While Draco was still studying his surroundings, she slowly inched her way further and further forward. Her foot caught the base on which the armour was propped up; her loud gasp of breath and little squeak of pain, not to mention the loud, metallic clank, were more than enough to have Malfoy whip his wand out from his pocket and stalk back towards her.

His face was unreadable when he found her. He felt for her shoulders and pushed her further into the alcove behind them. The scant light from the sconces in the hall cast dark shadows across his face and illuminated the straight, regal lines and angles that had become far too prominent. In that instant though, she was struck by just how handsome Malfoy had become. He whispered a _Finite_, and her Disillusionment fell away. He braced his forearms on either side of her head and leaned in. For one terrifying, confusing moment, Hermione thought he was about to kiss her. Instead, he dropped his forehead to hers, and a single tear glittered as it fell down his cheek. She tamped down the sudden, inexplicable urge she had felt to wipe it away for him. He drew in a deep breath, and brought his eyes to hers again.

"You need to get back to your tower, Granger," he bade her in a low, nearly inaudible whisper. His warm, mint-scented breath fanned out over her cheek, raising goosebumps over her flesh. "Now, before it's too late."

"What's happening, Malfoy?" she asked, her voice quiet and shaky. "What are you going to do?"

He looked as though he wanted very much to tell her, but he steeled himself and shook his head instead. He then removed his wand from his pocket. She immediately felt the cold, wet trickle of a Disillusionment Charm fall over her skin once again.

"Count to ten, then go. Run. Don't look back. Don't leave the tower again tonight." And with that, he was gone, his footsteps echoing around the cold, empty hall.

There was an urgency to his tone that told her not to argue. She heeded his words and took off in a light jog back to the other end of the corridor, and chanced a glance backwards; Malfoy was nowhere to be seen, and what little light there had been was gone, leaving the corridor blacker than night.

"Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder," she whispered to herself.

In the time it had taken her to get back to Gryffindor Tower, the news rang out through the castle that Albus Dumbledore was dead, and that Death Eaters had infiltrated the school. Hermione had never felt more betrayed by a person that she did by Draco Malfoy in that moment.

It had been decided at the conclusion of sixth year, after the death of Dumbledore, that she would not be returning for her seventh year. Instead, she, Harry and Ron would take as long as it took traversing Europe, hunting for and destroying Voldemort's Horcruxes. For their own safety, as it wasn't beyond Voldemort to target specific Muggle families, Hermione felt she had no choice but to _Obliviate_ her parents. She came home from Hogwarts and spun all manner of lies; of leaving Hogwarts, of abandoning magic, of returning home, and they had been so, so happy. The next morning, she sobbed as she turned her wand on them and removed their memories of their identities, their lives, their home and their daughter, and replaced them with new ones, with Wendell and Monica Wilkins, who had finally decided to live out their lifelong dream of moving to sunny Australia.

She packed a bag with a built-in Extension Charm and filled it with everything she would need for the upcoming journey; clothes, books, basic toiletries, first aid equipment both Muggle and magical, a tent, some tins of food and sleeping bags, for Harry and Ron would certainly forget theirs. With one final look back at the home she had grown up in, and a quick look at the unconscious couple in the living room that were just starting to come to, Hermione fought back tears and Apparated to the Burrow.

She, Harry and Ron went over their plans for the coming year in secret, never letting a soul in on what they would be doing. It had already been decided that they would leave sometime after Harry's birthday, when he would no longer be under the Trace. In that time, they were visited by the Minister of Magic, Rufus Scrimgeour, who read to them from Dumbledore's will. She was surprised to receive a first-edition copy of _Tales of Beedle the Bard_, written entirely in runes; she hadn't had much to do with Dumbledore, really.

They stayed long enough at the Burrow to see Bill and Fleur's wedding come under attack by Death Eaters, all of whom were still relentlessly pursuing Harry. In the scrimmage, she managed to find Harry and Ron and took their hands in hers, Apparating them to Muggle London. Regardless of their Muggle surroundings, they had been quickly located by a pair Death Eaters, none of whom had any qualms about using magic in such a setting. Together, she, Harry and Ron managed to subdue the Death Eaters, but they knew they couldn't let them leave. So, Hermione had taken her wand in hand and used a spell she had sworn she would never use again; she Obliviated them.

She spent the remaining summer with Harry and Ron, hiding at Grimmauld Place. Together, they pondered the mystery of 'R.A.B', the initials on the cryptic note found inside the fake locket Harry and Dumbledore had collected the night of his death. The swift revelation that it was Sirius' late brother, Regulus Arcturus Black, who had turned his back on Voldemort and actively sought to bring him down was all at once terrifyingly exciting and absolutely daunting, particularly when they learned just what would need to be done in order to retrieve the true locket.

Breaking into the Ministry and forcibly removing the locket from Umbridge's neck seemed like an impossible task on paper; they would need to obtain Polyjuice, as there would not be enough time to brew the complex potion, incapacitate a trio of Ministry workers to impersonate, and find a way to retrieve the locket without drawing attention to themselves. Inadvisable? Yes. Impossible? Not at all. And much easier than she thought, particularly when Mafalda Hopkirk, the woman she was Polyjuiced as, was whisked away by Umbridge herself for her assistance in a series of trials. The trials she was to take part in, however, were nothing short of sickening.

When she saw what the Ministry was doing to Muggle-borns, rounding them up and imprisoning them for 'theft of magic', it was all she could do not to vomit. She didn't want to believe that the whole Wizengamot agreed with that particular ruling, but then why wasn't anyone standing up against it? Were they so content to let their world slide into the bloody dark ages? She listened, sick to her stomach, to the tearful testimony of Mary Cattermole as she was accused of stealing a wand and forcefully entering the Wizarding world, of stealing magic and work from other hardworking pure-bloods and half-bloods. She would have turned her wand on Umbridge and fired off every sodding hex she knew if it hadn't been for Harry barreling into the courtroom and doing that very thing for himself.

He fired a Body-Bind Curse at Umbridge and it set the courtroom in uproar. While she still could, Hermione reached over and ripped the pulsating locket away from the evil old wench's throat and ran to where Harry and Ron, still both under their Polyjuiced guises, were shepherding the remaining Muggle-borns awaiting trial out of the courtroom and pointing them to safety.

Together they made a mad dash to the atrium and the open Floos with Death Eater security following hotly at their heels. She took Ron and Harry's hands in hers and Apparated them to Grimmauld Place, but a Death Eater had been waiting for them there. Their hiding place compromised, Hermione closed her eyes and Apparated again, this time to the Forest of Dean, where she had camped with her parents as a child.

And so began their long months of Horcrux hunting. It had been a long, brutal and dangerous process that saw all their friendships stretched to the absolute limits before being brought back and fortified through love, hope and shared experience. While she and Harry had been both extraordinarily angry and deeply depressed by Ron leaving, it had bought them closer than ever before. When Ron returned by way of the Deluminator and helped Harry retrieve the Sword of Gryffindor from the bottom of a frozen lake then destroyed that blasted locket, their friendship, which had been tenuous for a time, came back in the end stronger than ever.

Not long after, Harry spoke Voldemort's name, unaware of the fact that there was a Taboo on it, and they were captured by Snatchers. She managed to hit Harry with a hex to disfigure his appearance before they were taken, but there was nothing any of them could do.

The Malfoy Manor held none of the grandeur or extravagance she would have expected, especially when she thought back on her first two years at Hogwarts and remembered Malfoy's loud and exceedingly boastful proclamations about his many-winged mansion. She couldn't deny the gothic beauty of the foreboding structure, but it looked as though all colour and any happiness that may have resided within the walls had been completely sucked out, and the dark, lifeless interior was much the same. Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy sat stoically in high-backed, winged chairs, and had a look about them that Hermione recognised in everyone she saw these days: a fierce, unrelenting desire to see the war and the psychopath behind it finally finished once and for all.

Bellatrix Lestrange forcibly pulled Draco Malfoy from the shadows. She had taken his thin face in her hands and forcibly pulled him down so he was eye level with Harry and demanded he identify them. Hermione remembered the way they all held their breath when his eyes washed over Harry and lingered on his forehead, the bolt-shaped scar distorted and misshapen after the Stinging Hex she had cast on him back in the forest. Draco's eyes then moved over Ron, and finally onto her, where he studied her with such unwavering intensity that she almost faltered under his gaze. He slowly looked away, though, and with one last, lingering look at her, he told his aunt that he couldn't be sure of who they were.

It was then that one of the Snatchers that had caught them found the Sword of Gryffindor in her purse, and Bellatrix had taken on a fury the likes of which Hermione had never witnessed before. Even the Malfoys and the Snatchers had visibly winced at her volume. Bellatrix had demanded loudly, and with far more urgency than they ever would have anticipated, to know just how they had come upon the sword. Despite their attempts to throw her off with their desperate claims that the sword was a replica of the original, Harry and Ron were taken down to the dungeons, and Hermione had been left to face interrogation from a woman demented by power, time and the blind worship of a man who was truly, gravely psychotic.

The _Cruciatus_ curse felt all at once as though her blood was being boiled, as though her skin was being stretched to the point that it split entirely, and as though all her bones were being snapped, one by one. All the while, Bellatrix had been screeching down at her, but Hermione had no idea what she had been saying; the blood in her ears pounded far too loudly for her to hear anything. She was dimly aware, also, of the conflicted gaze of Draco Malfoy as he watched her writhe in pain on the floor of his Drawing Room. The knowledge that he was there, watching her torture, was more humiliating than she could stand. She blocked him out as best she could, and answered Bellatrix's questions with defiant screams of denial and misdirection. The curse had been lifted then, and suddenly there was a knife drawing searing, hot lines into her upper arm. She had prayed between cries of pain to God or whoever else was listening that this hell would let up soon.

Before she could even begin to register what had happened, she was on a beach, with saltwater stinging her arm painfully. For the first time, she looked down to see what had been etched into her skin, for Bellatrix had certainly been slow and methodical in her movements. Tears fell and a painful swoop dipped into her belly when she saw the bloody lines of the word 'Mudblood', probably forever scarred into her skin.

They regrouped with Mr. Ollivander, Luna and a goblin at Shell Cottage, a small home on the sea owned by Bill Weasley and his new bride, Fleur Delacour. Hermione spent two full days in a potions-induced sleep, experiencing painful and frequent seizures due to her prolonged exposure to the torture.

The war played out much like one would have prayed for it, though they lost many in the process. They retrieved Hufflepuff's cup from the Lestrange vaults in Gringotts, returned to Hogwarts for Ravenclaw's diadem which had been hidden in the Room of Hidden Things, and destroyed them. With Snape's death came the revelation that Harry himself was a Horcrux, and Hermione had been absolutely heartbroken watching Harry walk off into the Forbidden Forest, knowing he was about to meet his death.

Ron had pulled her back into the castle where they continued to fight. She picked up a duel with a nameless Death Eater and vented everything she had felt throughout the night into the fight. She cried tears of anger, frustration and heartbreak, and cast the Killing Curse for the first and only time in her life that night. She looked up to find only one other person in the hall watching what she was doing across the sea of green and red flashes. Draco Malfoy was staring at her as though he had no idea who she was.

The high pitched whine of Voldemort's voice resonated through the hall again, speaking with sickening satisfaction of the demise of Harry Potter, traitor to the Order. She watched as Hagrid carried Harry's limp body, but she couldn't bring herself to believe it. Then there had been a great commotion, the sound of a stampede, and she was sure she had never felt so relieved to see a Centaur in her life. In the ensuing fracas, Neville, holding aloft the Sword of Gryffindor, beheaded the great snake Nagini, effectively destroying the final Horcrux and leaving Voldemort truly vulnerable for the first time in decades. She, and no one else apparently, had not noticed the little detail of Harry's body disappearing.

When Harry revealed himself, a loud gasp resounded, and the crowd stopped what they were doing to watch enraptured as the two leaders of entirely different causes battled it out once and for all. Curses had flown from both wands but, comically enough, it had been Harry's Disarming charm which met Voldemort's killing curse, coupled with his knowledge of the true ownership of the Elder Wand, that had finally ended the war, and sent Voldemort scattered like ash on a breeze.

With the word 'Mudblood' carved permanently into her arm, Hermione felt that she could do no more. She would tie up her loose ends and make the necessary changes, but she knew her life as she knew it in the magical world was over. It was never going to matter how much she tried, she would never be viewed as anything more than an ignorant 'Mudblood', and it was never going to matter how hard she fought to change it; those who were most prejudiced always existed in high places, and they worked at maintaining the pure-blood status quo. Besides, she wasn't sure she particularly wanted to live in a world where Muggle-borns could be so thoughtlessly, so easily tossed aside, not to mention a world which so easily brought out the absolute worst in her.

She decided to travel to Australia to retrieve her parents. She had set them up in a nice flat in Kensington, a small suburb on Sydney's outskirts. She followed them around for a few days, getting a feel for their new lives. They had jobs and friends and an active social life, Wendell and Monica Wilkins seemed truly content with their lot Down Under. She knocked on the door of their flat and, as they both approached the door to open it, she withdrew her wand and aimed it at them as she intoned the counter curse.

Once she had returned their memories, the look of recognition that flickered in their eyes was quickly replaced by one of deep disappointment and unmistakable anger as she explained what she had done.

They spoke to her in low, ominous tones about lies, breaches of trust and how they didn't think themselves able to look at their daughter anymore without wanting to burst into tears. They also told her that she had made her choice when she took their memories and sent them to a different country without their consent, but Hermione barely heard a word of anything that was said; their voices sounded tinny and faraway to her ears.

She had cried on the park bench across from their flat for close to a week before deciding to pick herself back up and head back to the UK.

She never expected the feeling of total alienation that assailed her upon her return. Losing her tether to the Muggle world left her feeling lost, bereft, floating between two planes and belonging to neither. Hermione felt completely and utterly lost. Not wanting to worry Harry or Ron, she visited them a few times, purely to keep up appearances, but they seemed not to notice much, both more than preoccupied with their newfound romances with Ginny and Lavender.

She bought an overly spacious flat in Muggle London, the first one her finger had fallen on in the real estate guide, with the generous reparation money bestowed upon her by the Ministry after the war. She furnished it sparingly with only the bare essentials: a fridge, a bed, and a microwave. Apart from ensuring a regular delivery of toiletries and food – though the food more often than not went untouched and uneaten – from a local supermarket, she never touched the money again.

Without her friends and family, the world fell away, and she sunk deep into somewhere dark. It was too easy. Within a month of taking it, she left her job as an office clerk in a Muggle bookkeeping agency. She had no drive, no determination beyond the moment, and all she wanted was to just close her eyes and sleep it all away.

The decision to snap her wand was, bizarrely, one of the easiest she had ever made. The fewer ties she had to that world, the better. When she felt the length of vine wood snap in her hold, she felt the most incredible sense of freedom, of complete and total liberation. She threw the sticks into a fire, watched them spark as the magic flowed out into the flames, and never looked back.

She hardly left her flat, she pulled away from her friends, and she could barely pull herself out of bed. She barely ate, she hardly slept, everything ached but she had no idea why. Before long, the idea of leaving the flat filled her with horror, but that was nothing compared to the icy hands that gripped her throat and seized tight at the thought of returning to the Wizarding world.

By her very loose count, it was around five months before anyone tried to contact her.

Harry tried many times to coax her out of the shell in which she had ensconced herself. She never knew what to tell him when everything worth saying was plain to see around him. He sat down at the edge of her bed and stroked her hair, worrying not for the mess around him or just how greasy and knotted her hair had become, so she said nothing, often just listening to his whispered apologies as he sobbed above her. He came back religiously, though, every Saturday and Sunday for a few hours at a time before, she assumed, he couldn't bring himself to stay any longer. Every now and then, he would bring Ron and Ginny with him, but neither of them stayed for very long.

Even now, almost a year later, she still remembered the final words she had rasped at him.

"_Please, Harry. Just let me go."_


	3. Chapter 3

Hi! Hope you'll enjoy this installment :)

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**A YEAR AND A HALF LATER**

Harry Potter took a seat at a table at the back of a small, nondescript Diagon Alley café and held his head in his hands. He fisted his messy hair and tugged painfully at the short strands, frustration, fear and dread clenching without restraint at his heart.

It broke his heart to see Hermione reduced to what she was now; a hollow version of her former self who struggled to even exist anymore. It was… wrong. All of it was wrong! Hermione Granger was not meant to lose her drive and determination! The Hermione Granger Harry thought he knew would never give up.

And yet, she had. It terrified him.

Many of their friends, Ron included, thought it was simply the war that had taken its toll on Hermione, but Harry knew better. For all the wonderful companionship she offered, it was clear that Hermione had been deeply depressed for part of, if not all of her Hogwarts career; hated, bullied, tortured, and finally branded for something she had absolutely no control over. He hated himself for not seeing it sooner, for not helping when he knew he could have.

_In the aftermath of the war, Harry had been so giddy with relief and wrapped up with Ginny that he had barely come up for air, as had Ron with Lavender. Neither of them had noticed Hermione slip off to Australia. They saw her twice in quick succession upon her return before the time between her visits began to stretch to weeks then months at a time, but at that moment, he hadn't thought much of it. Before long, an entire year had passed, and Harry found himself happily engaged. He celebrated the occasion by going out for drinks with friends when he noticed that one was missing. It dawned on him then that he hadn't seen hide nor bushy hair of his best female friend in close to five months._

_Harry was astounded at himself. How on earth had he gone so long without seeing or even hearing from Hermione? He had assumed upon her return that she had safely found her parents, and that she must be making up for lost time with them. It occurred to him suddenly that Hermione had never once said anything about staying with her parents, nor had she ever said anything about finding them._

_His stomach had sunk to somewhere around his knees with that realisation, then dropped to his feet when he thought to Apparate to her; he had absolutely no idea where Hermione was._

_His position as a junior Auror hardly granted him the authority to rifle around in the Ministry records, but his standing as _The Harry Potter_ did. The morning after his realisation, he Apparated straight to the Ministry archives and did the one thing he swore he would never do; he marched right up to the blonde behind the desk and played the 'I'm Harry Potter' trump card and, as he had suspected, it worked like a charm. Less than thirty seconds later he had learned that Hermione was either unemployed altogether or simply wasn't employed by any known Wizarding establishment, and that she lived in a flat just outside of Muggle London in Hampstead._

_He left the Ministry via the broken telephone booth and walked a little ways down the street to flag down a taxi. The journey from Whitehall to Hampstead set him back fifteen pounds and took all of ten minutes, but it felt like hours, time he spent ruminating and imagining all the possibilities until he made himself sick._

_Hermione's flat was a modern looking, multi-levelled affair on West Heath Road. Harry looked down at the little slip of paper in his hands that bore the address, and read that Hermione occupied flat number twelve. He shoved the little slip into his coat pocket, and held his wand over the locked building door and muttered a quick, discreet_ Alohomora.

_Fear settled in his stomach like cement when he stopped in front of the door marked number twelve. There was a pile of catalogues sitting at the ground that looked like they hadn't been collected in weeks, if not longer, and the stench of mould and rotten fruit was strong even in the hallway. He raised his fist and banged on the door, loudly and repeatedly._

"_Hermione?" he yelled. "Hermione, are you in there?"_

_He pressed his ear against the door, listening for anything to indicate a presence within the flat. He held perfectly still and heard it - so soft he thought he might have imagined it - a low groan and a creaking bed._

"_Hermione, it's Harry," he yelled again, louder than before. "Are you alright?" He wrestled unsuccessfully with the doorknob. "Let me in!"_

_There was no response except for a loud, muffled thump followed by another groan. Panic seized Harry, and he banged more insistently at the door. _

"_Hermione, if you don't let me in, I swear I'll break down the door." He was met this time with silence, and he let out a low growl. "Don't test me, 'Mione! You've got until the count of three._

"_One."_

_Silence._

"_Two."_

_He pulled his wand from his pocket and poised it against the latch of the door, casting a wary glance around for any Muggles that might be watching._

"_Three."_

_A Muggle couple emerged, laughing to themselves, from the door behind him. They paused and tensed when they saw him, falling silent and looking at him oddly. Harry surreptitiously stowed his wand back up his sleeve and turned to face them properly._

"_Hello," the woman, a little older than he, greeted politely. The man beside her nodded in acknowledgement. "Do you know the girl who lives in there?" _

"_I do," Harry confirmed with a terse nod. "Do you?"_

_Both she and her companion shook their heads. "No, we don't. Not personally, at least." They exchanged an odd look. "We've seen her around, though. On occasion."_

_Harry took a step closer and fixed them with an urgent expression. "Have you seen her in the past week? Month?"_

_The pair exchanged another look. "I saw her collecting a food delivery two days ago," the man piped up. "Only for a moment, though. She backed up pretty quick when she saw me."_

"_How did she look?" Harry pressed. "Did she look well?"_

"_Um… no." The man ran a nervous hand through his hair. "No, she didn't. Sorry, mate. Is she your girlfriend or something?"_

"_No," Harry whispered as turned back and rested his forehead against the door. "Best friend. Sister, really."_

_The man looked on sympathetically. "I'm sorry."_

_Harry sighed. "Not your fault. My fault, really. I should have paid more attention."_

_The woman smiled at him and wrapped her hand around her partners' arm. "I'm sure it wasn't your fault. Good luck with her." She waved, and together they disappeared down the hallway and out of sight._

_Harry let out a deep breath and removed his wand from his sleeve. He held a hand against the door and felt for the warm, pulsing energy and slight hum of static that would indicate wards around her home, but found none_.

"Muffliato," _he murmured. Satisfied with the strength of the silencing spell, he moved his wand to the doorknob_.

"Bombarda."

_The Blasting spell shattered the doorknob and broke the lock. He shook his head in disbelief; he would have thought that someone like Hermione would have the heaviest of wards on her home, given who she was. Harry propped a hand against the door and pushed. The bottom of the door caught on a pile of paper on the ground, and he shoved more forcefully with his shoulder against it to get it open._

_His first thought was that the flat was large. Too large, even. Hermione had never really been one for extravagance and superfluous opulence. His second thought was that it didn't look as though anybody even lived in there. The floor was covered in a layer of rubbish, leaving only small catches of the timber flooring visible to his gaze, and there was a strong, stale odour about the room, but there was nothing else to the place. There was no furniture, no Muggle appliances that he could see. The windows had been covered up with Muggle newspapers, there were no pictures on the walls. There was nothing at all that indicated a presence in the house._

_Harry closed the door behind him and mended it with a muttered_ Reparo. _He then intoned a series of charms at the room. He Vanished the rubbish on the floor and the newspapers in the windows, and the large room both dulled and cheered with the bright, mid-morning sun._

_Heavy streaks of dust flew in the beams of light and made thick layers on each available surface. Harry stepped further into the room and ran a finger along what would have been a kitchen bench. He picked up a thick, dark mass of grime, leaving a shining white line in its wake, and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger with a grimace before wiping it on his jeans. A quick wave of his wand, and the dust was gone._

_A mouldy loaf of bread and a bowl of decomposing oranges sat on the sink. Harry wrinkled his nose at the smell and Vanished them, too. He opened the double door leading onto a small balcony and let in the gentle breeze that was ruffling the tops of the trees outside._

_He heard another muffled thump and once more a series of icy chills went down his spine. He followed the sound through the flat and came to a stop in front of another heavy door, it too covered with a thick layer of dust. He took a deep breath and opened the door, wincing against the loud, protesting groan it gave. He thought, with a swoop of extreme sorrow in his stomach, that this door likely wasn't opened all that often._

_The room was dark as well; a pair of heavy curtains were drawn against the windows. He stepped silently through the room and opened them slightly, allowing a single shard of light to cut through. The smell of stale linen, poor hygiene, along with the small, huddled figure under the blanket, was almost enough to drive Harry to tears. What the hell had happened to her?_

"_Hermione?" He took a tentative step forward. "Hermione, is that you? Are you alright?"_

_There was a groan, and the figure moved._

"_Hermione?" Harry tried again, resting a hand on what he believed to be her back. "Are you awake? It's Harry."_

_She rolled over, and Harry fought the urge to gasp at her appearance. Hermione was a shell of her former self; greying skin, dull, sunken eyes, hollowed cheeks, cracked lips and knotted, matted hair. Her arms were reed-thin, and her t-shirt was limp on her bony frame. _

"_Merlin, what happened to you, Hermione?" he breathed. He took a seat by her side and wrapped her hand in his. Her skin felt as thin and dry as paper._

"_What are you doing here, Harry?" she asked in a dry, cracked voice._

"_What am I doing here?" he repeated blankly. "Hermione, where have you been?"_

_Her glassy eyes swept the room. "Here. I've always been here."_

"_Yeah, but…" He trailed off, gesturing a wild, flailing hand around her bedroom. "God, why? Why here? Why not with me and the Weasleys?"_

_She shook her head slowly and rubbed at her temple with the hand he wasn't holding, as though she had a migraine mounting. It was a look he had seen thousands of times back at Hogwarts, something that was quintessentially Hermione, but it wasn't at all comforting or familiar. "I didn't want to live there anymore. I wanted to come home."_

"_What about your parents?" he asked. "Did you find them?"_

_She let out a hollow, bitter laugh. "Yes. I found them."_

"_And?" Harry prodded. "Are they here?"_

"_They sent me away."_

_Harry's jaw dropped in shock. "They sent you away?" he repeated dumbly. "Why?"_

"_It wasn't huge shock. I should have been ready for it. I lied to them just so I could have one happy night with them. Huge lies, too. The unforgivable sort, really. Then I erased their minds of me and sent them to another country while I fought in a war that very nearly saw me dead on multiple occasions. Then I go find them and expect everything to be roses. Of course it wouldn't be! I'm a horrid daughter."_

"_You are not a horrid daughter!" Harry denied vehemently, clutching her hand tighter. "If anything, what you did was my fault. You never would have had to send them away if it weren't for me."_

_She shook her head slowly and squeezed her eyes shut. "It's hardly your fault, Harry. We had been drifting apart since the summer before fourth year anyway. They didn't like magic very much, you see, and I don't think they appreciated it when I kept choosing magic over them."_

"_What about your wand?" he asked, looking over at her bedside table. He didn't recall seeing one when he was tidying the kitchen either. "Where is it?"_

"_Gone, Harry," she whispered dejectedly. "I snapped it and burned the two halves about a year ago."_

"_What?" Harry yelped. "Why would you do something like that?"_

_She shrugged. "I didn't want it anymore," she told him simply, as though it explained everything. "I didn't need it anymore."_

_Harry sighed and ran a hand through his hair, making the messy strands stand on end. "I am so, so sorry, Hermione," he breathed._

"_Why?" she asked, unmoving. "This isn't your fault."_

"_That's where you're wrong. This is entirely my fault."_

"_Don't be ridiculous, Harry," she retorted, the rebuke lost on her weak tone. She coughed twice. "You are not responsible for me. And this… it's not anyone's fault, really." She looked around her room with sad eyes. "It just happened."_

"_I could have done more for you," Harry whispered, tears falling down his cheeks in earnest. He wiped them away angrily. "God, I was so selfish!"_

_Hermione reached her other hand from under her blanket and stroked his knuckles. "Harry, you are the least selfish man I have ever known. And even if you were, there's hardly a person more entitled to be a little selfish every now and then. You gave away so much of yourself over the years. It was time for you to focus on yourself, and find out just who you were beyond the Boy Who Lived."_

_He wanted to laugh, but it came out as more of a sob. "I've missed you so much, Hermione," he whispered. "I don't think I realised just how much until now."_

"_I've missed you too, Harry."_

"_I'm getting married," he revealed, looking at her through the veil of hair that hung in her face. "To Ginny, of course. I asked her a few days ago. She said yes."_

"_I'm happy for you," she croaked. "Ginny, too. You deserve to be happy."_

"_What about you, Hermione?" Harry pleaded, his heart aching. "What do you deserve?"_

_She paused, looking deeply contemplative. "I don't know."_

_He gestured around them with frantic hands. "You don't deserve this! You don't deserve to fade away like this! Bloody hell, Hermione, I won't let you!"_

_Tears welled in her bloodshot eyes and she shook her head. "There's nothing else for me, Harry. I can't live in _that_ world and…" The tears began to streak down her pallid cheeks. "I can barely live in this one either."_

"_That's where you're wrong," he refuted stubbornly. "I mean it, Hermione, I won't let you live like this! I'll keep coming back, I'll keep cleaning your home and if I need to, I'll even do the necessary cleaning charms on you!"_

_She made an odd noise; a chuckle mixed with a sob. "You've got a fiancée and a life to live, Harry. Please, don't waste it all on me. I wouldn't be able to forgive you if you did that."_

"_You're hardly a waste, Hermione. You're my best friend." He moved to sit up against the headboard where he wrapped an arm around her thin shoulders and pulled her against him. "You better get used to me, 'cause I'm not going anywhere."_

Harry shook his head of the memory and wiped at his eyes when he saw a familiar head of white-blond hair.

"Malfoy," he called out. "Over here."

His patented sneer firmly in place, Draco moved slowly through the throng of tables and took the empty seat opposite Harry. "Potter," he greeted coolly.

"Thank you for coming," Harry said, watching as Draco picked up his menu and perused it with his signature careless disinterest. "I know we aren't friends, and we haven't exactly spoken since... then, and –"

"I owe you this much, Potter," he cut in, without looking up. "What do you want?"

Harry found himself bristling somewhat. He supposed it was stupid of him to expect polite small talk. He stayed silent as he watched Malfoy beckon for a waitress, who took his order of Earl Grey tea and a slice of apple cake with far more tittering giggles and flirty winks than was necessary for the task. They were silent for the long stretch of minutes that it took for Malfoy's order to arrive.

"I don't know if you noticed," Harry began apprehensively as soon as the waitress was out of earshot once more, "but Hermione left the Wizarding world about a year ago."

Draco snorted into his teacup, but Harry didn't miss the way his eyes both flashed and dimmed at Hermione's name. "Of course I noticed," he informed him mildly. "The bloody papers didn't shut up about it."

"What they don't tell you is that she has folded so far in on herself that I don't think she has even seen the light of day for the past year."

Harry felt gratified to see Draco tense.

"She snapped her wand," he continued. "She's living as a Muggle, but she isn't living well."

"The war?" Draco asked in a clipped tone, stabbing his fork aggressively into his cake and pulling a chunk away. He chewed it with a heavy scowl. "Sodding Pink Ladies," he muttered to himself. "Everyone bloody knows you cook with Granny Smiths." He poured a small jar of cream over the cake and, far more delicately this time, removed another sliver of cake with the side of his fork and brought it to his mouth. He scrunched up his face as he chewed and swallowed with a grimace. "Fucking pathetic. An absolute waste of good Galleons. Where the bloody hell did that waitress go?"

"Actually, I don't think it was just the war," Harry cut in loudly before Malfoy could go off on his tangent. "She'd been unhappy ever since Ron and I met her. The war… the war just broke the cracks once and for all."

"Would you stop being so sodding vague, Potter?" he snapped.

"I don't know how else to describe it, Malfoy. She's broken." He drew in a deep, shuddering breath before continuing. "I'm absolutely terrified for her, Malfoy," he said lowly, watching as Malfoy's features both darkened and dropped. "I'm terrified that I'm going to find her hanging from the ceiling whenever I visit. Hell, she's barely alive as it is."

"Why are you telling me this?" Draco ground out through gritted teeth. "Is today the day you pompous Gryffindors choose to single out a former Death Eater and turn their conscience inside out?"

"I'm telling you this because I think you're just the person to talk to her."

There was a tense stretch of silence before either of them spoke again.

"You're more insane than you look, Potter," Draco said in wonderment, looking at him as though he had sprouted another head. "Why do you think I'd be able to get anywhere with Granger?"

"Ron and I get nowhere with her. She rolls over and ignores us. She doesn't speak and she barely moves."

"And I would be different why?"

Harry shrugged. "With you, I figure she would at least get angry."

Draco bit out a harsh, humourless laugh. "Yes. I, the bane of her existence and witness to what was possibly the lowest point of her life thus far, am very likely to get her angry."

"Believe me, Malfoy. You have yet to see her at her lowest."

"Any particular reason why you can't do this yourself, Potter? You're her best friend or some such nonsense. Surely you're a far better fit for something like this than I am."

Harry chewed at his bottom lip and ran a hand through his hair. "I have too much guilt," he admitted sadly. "You see, it's my fault she's like this. If I'd been there for her from the beginning, like she was with me since first bloody year, this probably wouldn't have happened. But now, I just… I don't want to make her hurt more than she already is. I can't push her or force her… I can't bring myself to do it even though I know she needs it."

Draco nodded stiffly and sipped his tea. "Fair enough, I suppose."

"That, and I know you've been half in love with her since she hit you in third year, maybe even before that. You might be more motivating than Ron or I."

Draco hit the teacup to its saucer so forcefully that it shattered, spilling the remnants of the tea over the starched, white tablecloth. The waitress fluttered back over at the noise and fussed over the table with her wand and a damp cloth.

"It's fine!" Draco barked at the waitress, and she let out a little squeak. "Go. Now!"

"Must you be so unpleasant?" Harry questioned as the waitress all but sprinted back to her till. "The poor girl was only trying to do her job."

"Where in the hell did you get that idea, Potter?" Draco snapped. "About me being in love with Granger? Who told you that?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm not blind, for one." He pushed his wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose and smirked. "Or, at least not in the figurative sense. Nor am I stupid."

Draco huffed a disbelieving little chuckle.

"I also know that you sunk a fair amount of money into looking for her. Someone at the Ministry told me a Malfoy was trying to get his hands on Hermione's private records. Your investigator must have been a pure-blood; no one else would be so condescending as to assume no one would leave the Wizarding world and not look outside of it."

Draco's grey eyes flashed with something dark and dangerous. "Potter, if you don't still have a bleeding death wish hanging over your head, you'll shut your mouth right now."

"I also know that you spoke to her while she was petrified in second year," Harry continued without concern. "I saw the way you looked at her during the Yule Ball, and the way you looked as though you wanted to tear Krum apart for touching her. I know that your company almost went bankrupt around the time _The Daily_ _Prophet_ first started reporting Hermione's disappearance, and I know what you did for her in sixth year. You probably saved her life that night, and the night of the Quidditch World Cup. You didn't give her, or any of us, away that night at the manor, even though I know you knew exactly who we were. But above all, I saw how you were with her. You love her. Quite simple, really."

Draco sneered. "Did you tell her that I spoke to her when she was petrified?"

Harry shook his head, a small smile on his lips. "It's not for me to say. But you should. She should know other people out there care for her."

Draco took a long, deep breath, leaned back and crossed one long leg over the other, his patented smirk falling back into place. "You thought I was getting up to all manner of rather dastardly deeds by second year, Potter, not to mention what was happening during our sixth year. Why didn't you ever stop me?"

Harry stifled a laugh. "You were reading her fairytales in second year, Malfoy. And talking to her about classes. I wasn't even sure how to broach that let alone force you to leave."

The faintest etchings of a true smile pulled at his lips, but was gone as soon as it appeared. "Where is she, Potter?"

Harry slid a small piece of card across the table. "That's her address. But, um…"

"Spit it out, Scarhead, I don't have all day."

"It's just…" He stopped and sighed. "Try not to judge her. She has it hard enough without anyone breathing down her neck about the state of her house."

Draco looked at him with confusion. "What are you talking about?"

Harry rubbed at his scar. "I usually try to clean up a bit when I visit. I couldn't do that today; I was running late enough as it was, and cleaning charms only do so much. It's just… her house is… it's a little bit…"

"Messy?" Draco supplied, exasperated. "Filthy? Deplorable? Uninhabitable?"

"It's big, but messy, I suppose," Harry conceded, choosing his words with care. "She doesn't own, or eat enough for it to be anything else. I try to clean up a bit when I visit, though, but I'm hopeless at housekeeping charms; they always backfire on me."

"Don't dance, Potter." Draco fixed him with a glare. "How bad is it?"

Harry pulled off his glasses and breathed on the lenses before rubbing them clean with the hem of his shirt. "Dusty, mostly," he provided after a moments' silence. "And just… broken. Lots of cracks in the walls and lights that don't work. I clear away the rubbish, so there's nothing like that. There's a smell, too. I can't get rid of it, I think it's sunk into the floors, so I spray air freshener. If I were a deeper sort of person, I might even say Hermione's home perfectly reflects her mental state; in utter disrepair, but fixable with the right tools."

Draco snorted. "And I am the right tool? I don't know if I should be flattered or offended."

Harry smirked and nodded. "You, Malfoy, are the perfect tool. The king of tools, as it were."

He cocked an eyebrow at that. "What exactly do you want me to do, Potter?"

"I need you to piss her off. I need you to get her angry. Fucking hell, Malfoy, I want you to burn her up like you did in school. I want you to tell her the truth. I want you to challenge her. I want you to do the things I can't because I can't bear to be the one to cause her more pain."

Draco gaped. "And what the bloody hell makes you think I want to be that person?"

Harry smiled. "Because you love her. You'll do whatever needs to be done to bring her back to us. I trust you to do that."

"Potter, if she's as bad as you say she is… she's going to need a hell of a lot more than I can give her. She needs a Mind Healer. I make potions. Not necessarily a vocation that lends itself to intense psychoanalysis."

"Then you'll give her the push she needs." Harry remained resolute in the face of Draco's disbelief. "I am under no illusions as to the person you used to be, Malfoy. But I am completely out of options. I'm desperate. If I thought there was someone else who could do this, I'd be asking them. There isn't. It's all you."

* * *

**AN: **Hope you enjoyed this one! Next chapter is the final one, but it's quite a bit longer than these past few, so edits might take a tad longer. Reviews are wonderful :)


	4. Chapter 4

Hey folks! Last chapter here, dedicated entirely to Dramione interactions. It's not fully edited, I'll come back next week to complete that, but I wanted to post it now, since so many of you seem to be waiting for it - enjoy :)

And again, a huge, mega-fantastic thank you to kanames_harisen for beta'ing this story :)

If you read this during the fest, there has been an additional part added that was not included in the fest version.

* * *

It took a great deal longer to find Granger's flat than Draco had anticipated. He had yet to make acquaintance with this side of London, he'd never had a reason to. He supposed it was a nice little suburb, with a quaint sort of feel, but the pit of dread sinking a hole in his stomach kept him from appreciating the niceness of the area for the moment.

He pulled his overcoat tighter around himself and pushed through the glass door as another couple was leaving. They looked at him oddly as he passed them, obviously not recognising him as an occupant, but he didn't break his stride.

Draco stopped in front of door number twelve and drew a deep breath. He could already catch the smell Potter had warned him about; of rubbish and dirty linen, masked with something artificial. Uncaring of the fact that Muggles that may be watching him, Draco lifted his wand to the door and incanted, "_Alohomora_."

Predictably, the lock clicked open, and Draco pushed his way inside. He immediately cringed; the funerary odour of fake flowers was offensive, headache-inducing to his senses. He waved his wand with a scowl and all the windows flew open, letting in a breeze that wasn't anywhere near as strong as he would have liked.

He cast an eye around the sparse flat. Potter had obviously tidied up somewhat when he had visited last, but there were no furnishings, no personal effects, no colour and no magic. No underlying thrum of energy on the air. Draco shook his head in disbelief as he wondered to himself just how Granger had managed to live as a Muggle for so long after having experienced all the Magical world had to offer.

He paused at the kitchen, noticing a stack of letters sitting on her windowsill from where owls had given up trying to get her attention. He opened the window and picked them up, thumbing through them for the return addresses; there were thirteen from the Ministry, one from _The_ _Daily Prophets'_ subscription service, seven from Hogwarts, over a dozen from various Weasleys, three from Potter, two from Longbottom, and more than he cared to count from Lovegood. He added them to the pile already sitting on the bench and ventured further into the flat.

There was no doubt in his mind and no hesitance in his step when he reached the bedroom door. Without pause, he took the doorknob in hand and twisted, pushing forward into a large, dark, soundless room. He took short, shallow breaths in through his mouth and ventured further in until he could make out a small, hunched-over figure under the plain bedding.

"Fucking hell, Granger," Draco whispered to himself. "What have you done to yourself?"

He reached out to draw back the covers, revealing a curled up figure with hair more frightful than usual.

"A little birdy told me you've given up, Granger."

She rolled over, and Draco immediately saw everything Potter had warned him about. He felt as though all the air in his lungs hand been knocked out, and it was difficult to draw another breath.

"Malfoy?" she rasped, her voice hoarse from lack of use. "What are you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same thing, you know." He pulled apart the curtain at the window and let a shard of light cut through the darkness. "You don't belong here either."

Hermione rolled back over, letting out a deep, shuddering breath as she did so. "How did you find me?" she asked, deftly evading his last statement.

"Potter," he told her without elaborating further.

She made no reaction other than a quick quirk of her brow. "Figures."

"He's worried about you," Draco hedged. "A lot of people are."

"And what did Harry think you'd be able to do with me?" she asked bitterly. "Did he think you could save me?"

"I don't think I can save you, Granger. I'd be a hopeless optimist if I believed that."

She looked at him over her shoulder with an unreadable expression on her face. "Then what on earth are you doing here?"

He strode closer to the bed and took a seat at close to where her feet were pointed up beneath the sheets. "I'm just here to chat."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Because we're such fantastic friends?" she challenged with weak sneer.

"Because I'm different." He flicked a stray piece of lint off his dress pants. "And in your case, different is good. To have someone other than Potter or an assortment of Weasels breathing down your neck couldn't be anything other than refreshing."

"I don't want your help," she muttered darkly into her pillow.

"Where is your wand?"

"In ashes somewhere. Burnt it."

"Now why in Merlin's name would you do something so bloody stupid?" Draco snapped.

"Why would I keep something I no longer want? Why would I want to be reminded?"

"You could have achieved the same by keeping it in a locked drawer, you daft girl." He looked at her in disbelief. "What if you want it back someday?"

"Unlikely."

He shook his head and looked her over. She was just as Potter described; all bones and jutting angles, pale skin, cracked lips and dull eyes. Her hair was a horror show of a different sort now; matted, greasy and badly knotted, falling in a tangled heap over the sway of her arse.

"When was the last time you went outside, Granger?"

She paused. "Weeks," she guessed. "Months, maybe. I'm not sure anymore. Time sort of bleeds."

"Would you like to come outside? It's rather nice out."

"Not particularly."

He rolled his eyes. "Then what exactly would you like?"

"I'd like you to leave, Malfoy."

"You can't always get what you want."

She sighed. "Please leave, Malfoy. I just… I can't. Not today, okay?"

He studied her carefully. "Fine. Just this once. But don't think you'll be rid of me so easily next time." He stood and walked out, kicking a trail through the piles of screwed up paper on the floor.

"Oh, joy. And, Malfoy?" she called out, her voice tired and weak.

He stopped at the doorway and looked back over at her pitiful figure. "Yes, Granger?"

She rolled back over with a deep sigh. "Don't you dare come back."

**-XXX-**

"You know, Granger," Draco said to her the following morning as he munched on his banana muffin, "some people might argue that you have absolutely no right to feel the way you do."

"They'd probably be right," she admitted quietly. "I survived a war where many of my friends did not. I feel bad for feeling bad. In turn, I feel even worse. Silly, isn't it?"

"It's hardly surprising," he said with a snort. "You're so used to playing the martyr, why would it be any different now?"

Her eyes flashed all too briefly with anger, and Draco almost leapt with joy at the flicker of emotion.

"I am not being a martyr," she denied lowly. "You think I derive some sort of satisfaction from being this way?"

"I think you are so used to going along with what you think everyone else wants for you that you won't even try to stand up for yourself. Your parents pushed you away, so you don't think you belong with the Muggles, and you won't go back to the Wizarding world because you don't think they want you either! Which begs the question, Granger, just what the bloody hell do you want?"

"I want to be alone, Malfoy," she snapped. "I was perfectly fine before you showed up."

"Potter, too?" he challenged. "Were you fine before he showed up? Because, the way he tells it, you were as good as dead before he showed up."

She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.

"You were – you _are_ – the farthest thing from fine, Granger," Draco said lowly.

**-XXX-**

The following week didn't improve all that much from Draco's perspective. Granger still eyed him with her usual contempt and confusion at his presence, but she did speak, which far exceeded the expectations he'd had when Potter had first sought him out. When Potter had mentioned his worries about finding Granger dead one day, he'd thought she would be completely catatonic.

As per an agreement Draco wasn't sure he remembered making, he met Potter in the same little Diagon Alley café they had met in before. This time, he ordered the chocolate cake.

"How are you doing with her?" Harry asked.

"You were right about one thing, Potter; I make her quite angry."

"You made her angry!" he crowed with delight. "Merlin, I haven't seen anything more than tears and indifference from her in months! What did you say to her? How angry did she get?" he asked excitedly.

Draco shrugged and dropped another sugar cube into his tea. "I didn't have to say much at all; all I had to do was walk through the door. As for how angry, it isn't much, but it's there."

"Do you and she talk much?"

"I rile her up. She snaps. Sometimes, anyway. That is the extent of our conversations thus far."

"All we need now is for her to punch you again," Harry joked.

"Aren't you visiting her at all anymore, Potter?" Draco questioned. "You can well verify any improvement for yourself rather than dragging me back here."

"I visit on weekends. After you leave, of course. And I'm willing to bet that she acts very differently with you than she does with me. Plus, I think it's rather handy to have this… debrief, as it were. So we both know where we're at by the end of the week."

Draco stared. "Just how often do you plan on dragging me out like this?"

Harry shrugged. "As long as it takes."

**-XXX-**

"Did my magic make me evil, Malfoy?"

Draco looked up from his copy of _The Daily Prophet_ and fixed her with a disbelieving gaze. "What on earth makes you think that, Granger?"

She shrugged, busying herself with tracing the embroidery on her coverlet. "I wasn't really myself with magic. I trapped Rita Skeeter in a jar while in her Animagus form – "

"What's her form?" Draco cut in, curious.

"A beetle."

He snorted a laugh. "Appropriate. In either case, I think you did the world a favour with that one. Maybe you should have kept her in there."

"I watched as Umbridge was pulled into the Forbidden Forest by angry centaurs. I caused it, let it happen. I fully understood the implications, and I'm not entirely sure I feel guilty."

Draco paused to consider. "Umbridge was… unpleasant to say the least. She wronged you at every turn, she hurt your best friend, she tried to implement a Muggle-born register that would have done nothing but hinder you for the rest of your life, and she was downright cruel. What happened to her was unfortunate, but anyone who knew her wouldn't have done it differently. So no, Granger, you aren't evil for that. She, however, might very well have been."

"I used magic to destroy my parents' memories. In fact, magic destroyed my entire relationship with them, but I don't regret a thing."

"And why would you? You saved their lives. You'd rather them alive than dead, wouldn't you?"

Hermione looked up from her blanket, fixing him with a blank gaze that chilled him. "I killed someone with my magic. And you watched me do it."

"Are you trying to convince me, Granger?" he asked curtly.

"I'm merely presenting the facts."

"Your facts are not as iron-clad as you believe. When you cast that _Avada_, if you hadn't done it, he would have. You were in a war, Granger. We all were. Everyone understood the implications of what they were doing, including the person you duelled with."

"So I'm absolved for murdering him because he knew it might happen?" she challenged, her grip on her blanket turning her knuckles white."

"No, Granger. You're allowed to feel guilt, feel regret for what happened, because, Merlin knows, we all do, but you are not allowed to punish yourself for it. You are not evil for saving yourself! Feeling what you do for all the situations you described to me perfectly demonstrate that you are the farthest thing from evil."

"Do you really believe that, Malfoy?" she asked softly, her eyes imploring.

"From the bottom of my apparently black heart, Granger."

**-XXX-**

"It was you who read me _The Fountain of Fair Fortune_ when I was petrified, wasn't it?"

Draco drew in a sharp breath. It was too bloody early for this. "Did Potter tell you that?"

She shook her head. "It's just a hunch I had. No one else calls me 'Granger' with such vehemence, you know. You apologised for calling me a Mudblood while I was petrified too, didn't you?"

He nodded stiffly. "I did. I meant it, too."

"You kissed me as well."

He felt his cheeks light up in a manner most unbecoming of a Malfoy. "Only to prove a point."

"And what point would that be?"

"That your Muggle fairytales are silly and fanciful."

She paused and looked at him oddly. "Did you really think a kiss would wake me up?" she asked.

Draco snorted a derisive laugh. "Don't be daft. I knew it wouldn't. As I said; silly and fanciful."

"Then why would you do it to begin with?"

"Firstly, I was twelve at the time. I will not be held responsible for something I did as a stupid child. Secondly, is this a conversation you really want to have right now?" he asked shortly.

Her jaw was set stubbornly when she declared, "I want to know."

"Then we're having it outside." He gestured to the door. "Come on, Granger. Let's go."

Her eyes narrowed as she settled back into her bed and crossed her thin arms across her chest. "Sneaky, Slytherin bastard," she muttered.

"And proud," he stated arrogantly.

"Did you ever see the pantomime again?"

"The what?"

"The pantomime of _The Fountain of Fair Fortune_," she prompted. "You said your mother took you to see it in Diagon Alley when you were five, but that you never saw it again after your father kicked up a fit over it."

Draco snorted. "You were never really petrified were you, Granger?"

A ghost of a smile upturned her lips. "You knew I could hear you, Malfoy. You never would have come back if you didn't."

He sighed and moved to lay next to her, propping himself up against the headboard and crossing his legs at the ankle. "I saw it again just last Christmas, after Father was imprisoned. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered it. Perhaps it was because Mother wasn't with me that time."

"Where was she?"

"Under house arrest. Only for a few weeks more, however." He watched her with a dry smile. "She was sentenced to eighteen months, I was sentenced to six. Seeing that pantomime again was one of the first things I did upon my release."

"How is your mother taking it?"

Draco thought back to the night after their trials. The manor had been fitted with all manner of wards that prevented them from leaving, and the use of house-elves had been severely restricted. He had held his mother as she cried into his shoulder and wept for her family and out of intense, unwavering thankfulness for the simple fact that it was all over.

"She's grateful she isn't in Azkaban. Considering the charges that were against her, and myself, it would have been far worse without Potter's intervention at our trials."

"Harry knew your mother didn't deserve Azkaban. Plus, he felt he owed her a life debt. As far as you go, it wasn't difficult to convince him to help you, too. It probably went a way to repaying your mother, too."

He turned to look at her. "Why did you tell him about that night in sixth year?"

She sighed and tugged at a loose thread in her bed sheet. "Harry has been, for the longest time, so determined to see the worst in you. He suspected your Death Eater affiliations from as early as fourth year, possibly even earlier than that. I had to make him see that you weren't all bad. As it happens, your very strange proclivities towards me tipped things in your favour quite well."

"Strange proclivities?"

"Every day, Malfoy, I was called Mudblood," she told him quietly. "Every day, someone told me I wasn't worthy of magic. Every day I had people look at me as though I was lower than the dirt on the bottom of their shoes. Of all those people who did those things, you were the only one I really expected to do them, and yet you weren't. Sure, you called me names on occasion, but it was always in a crowd. Perhaps you thought it was more humiliating that way, I'm not sure. You never said it when we were alone."

"Granger, you consistently beat me in every bloody test and exam, you turned much of my thought process on its head; energy spent taunting you until I was blue in the face was better spent studying so I could get one up on you at some point. But still, in light of everything, I should probably say this, since it is hideously overdue." He moved off the bed to kneel at its side, and she watched with amusement as he took her hand in his.

"For what I have said, what I have witnessed, what I have been a party to, and for what I have done, I am grievously, irrevocably sorry, Hermione."

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she gave a little sniff. "I forgive you, Draco."

**-XXX-**

"She smiled at me!" Harry exclaimed the next time they met. He clutched a mug full of hot chocolate in his hands that was full to bursting with marshmallows. "She actually smiled! I haven't seen her smile in a bloody age! I think it's working, Malfoy!"

Draco shrugged. "Perhaps."

"She told me she hasn't had a real low point in weeks," Harry pressed.

"Good for her."

"For all you claim to love her, you could at least pretend you give a toss, Malfoy."

Draco looked over at him sharply. "Given that we aren't Mind Healers, Potter, I'm not sure either of us should be the arbiters of Hermione's progress."

"A smile is progress, Malfoy."

**-XXX-**

"Aren't you getting tired of this, Malfoy?" she asked in exasperation as he took his spot on the edge of her bed.

He scoffed and removed a paper bag from the dragon-hide satchel hanging at his side. "Hardly, Granger. I'm just getting started."

"You've been coming here every bloody day for nearly four months now."

"And you've finally started paying attention to the calendar again. Well done. Would you like a muffin? There's a new bakery in Diagon Alley that makes the most scrumptious muffins."

"No, I don't want your sodding muffins!"

He shrugged and took out an apple and cinnamon one, taking a large bite and chewing with relish. "Too bad. They really are good. Oh well; more for me."

"You aren't being funny, Malfoy."

"I know. In either case, this isn't supposed to be funny."

"What is this supposed to be then?"

"I'm really not sure. But whatever it is, I think it's beginning to work, don't you?" He held out the bag and waved it in front of her face, cajoling her with it. "You're sure you don't want a muffin?"

Hermione watched the paper bag, her eyes narrowing with annoyance, and her stomach growled loudly. Her face flushed and he shot her a triumphant grin.

"Don't say a damn word," she hissed, snatching the bag from his outstretched hand. "Did you get any blueberry ones?"

**-XXX-**

Draco dropped his leather satchel to the floor with a heavy thud before sitting down that morning. Hermione eyed it warily as she propped herself up and waited for him to proffer her now usual blueberry muffin. Instead, he pulled from his bag a cupcake, covered in pink icing and with a bright red glace cherry on top. He took from his coat pocket a small, yellow candle and stabbed the pointy end into the cupcake and lit the wick with a wandless _Incendio_.

"What's the occasion?" she asked as she took the cupcake from him.

"Well, it's not every day you turn twenty. I would have bought a bigger cake, but that seemed silly considering it was just the two of us." He watched her for a reaction, and found nothing but confusion. "You can't honestly tell me you forgot your own birthday, Granger?"

"My birthday?" she repeated, her brow furrowed. "Is it really?"

"September nineteenth, correct?"

"Yes."

"Then yes, it is. Happy birthday."

"I had absolutely no idea." She blew out the candle and pulled it out before looking up at him in wonderment. "Thank you, Malfoy."

"That's not all." He bent to the floor and opened his bag, removing from in a large parcel wrapped in red and gold stripes, topped off with matching ribbon. He held it out to her with quivering arms; it was damn heavy!

Hermione's eyes immediately went wide and she shook her head. "No, no, Malfoy. You don't have to do that."

"But I wanted to," he countered. "Besides, I couldn't not think of you when I bought this." He placed it on her lap. "It's yours, Granger."

"It's heavy," she commented, shifting slightly in place.

"All the more reason to open it."

She plucked at the ribbon, slowly untying the knot and pulling it away. She surprised him then when she tore without restraint into the paper like a child. He reveled in the look of shock and delight that had crossed her features when the gift was revealed.

"_Hogwarts: A History_," she breathed.

"Brand new edition, completely updated. Even includes a chapter or fifty on Potter's exploits, hence why it's so damn thick you could probably keep a household fire burning for a week with a single copy. Your name makes multiple appearances. As does mine, though in a decidedly less complimentary light.

"I think you'll enjoy the section on the Room of Requirement. The new authors went quite in depth into the magic and history of the room. There's also a far more extensive chapter dedicated to the Sorting Ceremony and how the hat was first conceived. All quite fascinating, really. And I promise, they are quite upfront with the house-elves this time."

She looked up from her reverent stroking of the leather cover and gave him an odd look. "You've read this?"

"It was required reading in pure-blood circles. Not this particular edition, of course; this one only came out two months ago." He settled himself against her pillows, crossing his arms behind his head. "When I was young, my father always spoke so reverently of Hogwarts. He read to me from _Hogwarts: A History_ as though it were a storybook or poetry, or even gospel." He smiled at her look of shock. "Even if they're all cruel, sadistic arseholes, pure-bloods have at least this much in common; they all loved Hogwarts. Even Voldemort."

Hermione lifted the cover and perused the contents page. She smiled down at a moving portrait of Dumbledore and lifted a page with her thumb and forefinger, getting a feel for its texture and weight. "There was a lot to love about it," she murmured as she flicked over the pages.

"Who made the revisions?" she asked, looking up from her perusing of a page dedicated to the particularly bloody history of the previous Tri-Wizard tournaments. "Bathilda Bagshot was murdered during the war."

Draco reached over and closed the book. He ran a finger over the raised, gold-embossed names on the front, just beneath the title. "Garius Tomkink and Chroniculus Punnet. They're a pair of historians who decided to update all current history texts to be in line with the Wizarding world post-war. They've become quite prominent over the past two years. You'll find most books on the Hogwarts list have been revised to include the updated versions. I don't think that booklist has changed in over a century."

"The war changed everything else about the Wizarding world. Why not the books?"

"You are exactly right, Granger," he said, looking at her meaningfully. "The war changed _everything_."

**-XXX-**

Upon entering Hermione's flat the following morning, Draco's attention was drawn to the _tap, tap tapping_ of a small, tawny owl on the window. It wasn't an unusual occurrence. It was a familiar owl, one that would be waiting there most days and on most days, Draco would open the window, retrieve the missive and slap it down on top of the ever growing pile. He would then pull off a piece of his muffin to give to the owl before sending it off on its way once more.

Today though, the sight of the owl sitting on a new pile of mail outside, coupled with the unstable looking pile sitting on the kitchen bench, made him shake his head in exasperation. He opened the window and took the letter tied to the owls' leg and shooed it away without compensation. It hooted indignantly at him and nipped his hand before flying from the sill.

"Ow!" Draco brought his bleeding hand to his mouth and glared hatefully at the now tiny speck in the distance. He seized the new pile and stalked to Granger's bedroom, finding her propped up against the pillows and with the window and curtains already open.

"I have a little exercise in mind for you, Granger. And no blueberry today. I got you orange and poppy seed instead."

"That's fine." She took the muffin and immediately began pulling segments of it from the top. "What do you have in mind?" she asked after she had chewed and swallowed.

He tossed the pile of unopened mail onto the bed and sat opposite her crossed legs. "This pile has done nothing but grow since I started coming here. I add new letters that I see on the windowsill, but you never read them. Today, you will."

He watched a look of wary trepidation move through her eyes before it gave way to fear. Hermione looked up at him with a little shake of her head.

"You can and you will," he commanded gently. "This isn't even all of them." He picked up one of the newest ones, from Luna Lovegood according to the return address, and handed it over. "Lovegood. You can start with her."

With shaky hands, Hermione broke the wax seal, stamped with the image of a creature Draco had never seen before, and removed the letter. She read it silently, her lips mouthing the words as she went. Every so often, the corner of her lips would quirk upwards and, by the end, she had let out a genuine laugh.

"She's found Wrackspurts, apparently," she told him, smiling fondly as she read the words again. "They're like large dragonflies, except with ten legs and much longer, probing antennae. They glow silvery when viewed either through a blue lens or under blue light. I suppose that explains her ludicrous glasses. They're misty, with no mass of their own, but they can pass through matter, often living inside a persons' head where they change the brain chemistry and alter moods and thoughts. I suppose that's as good a supposition as any as to Ron's strange mood swings."

"I wonder if a Wrackspurt is what this is stamped on the wax." Draco picked up the discarded envelope and looked at the seal. "It looks vaguely like a dragonfly." He passed the envelope over for her inspection and picked up a new one. "This one is from Hogwarts. It's postmarked two days ago."

"Hogwarts?" she repeated, her brow furrowed in puzzlement. "What on earth do they want? Is McGonagall still Headmistress?"

"As far as I know. I'd expect her to hold that position until her death."

Hermione hummed in agreement and broke the wax seal on the paper, this time stamped with a miniature of the Hogwarts crest. She read over the short message, her eyes becoming increasingly larger as they passed over each line.

"That can't be right," she muttered to herself. "Absolutely absurd, irrational, no sense at all… Must have had the wrong name. Can't be for me. Ridiculous." She balled the paper up tightly and threw it to the corner of the room.

"What exactly is so ridiculous that it has you muttering like the criminally insane?"

"Flitwick wants an apprentice so he can retire. He wants… me as his apprentice." She shook her head and took another letter. "Can't be right, though. Must be a joke of some sort. Not a very good one, mind."

"Flitwick wants you as an apprentice?" he repeated. "Well? What are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing," she said, as though it was obvious. "It's a non-issue, Malfoy, just let it go."

"Why?" he asked, unable to understand. "You would make a fantastic teacher, Granger!"

"It doesn't matter, Malfoy, it isn't going to happen! Now, please, don't talk about it anymore."

"Fine," he muttered with annoyance. "But think about it. It's not often that offers like that come along."

Draco pulled from the pile a thick, white, nondescript envelope. It was out of place in the stack, made of smooth paper, not textured parchment, and sealed with glue. It had been stamped multiple times, and the ink had smudged in places that made the writing nearly illegible. He turned it over for the return address, and his eyes widened at what he read.

"Who's that one from?" she asked, putting down the letter she was reading from Longbottom.

He swallowed and held it out to her. "It's from Drs. Michael and Eleanor Granger."

Draco watched as she tensed and froze in place. She stared with wide, disbelieving eyes at the envelope in his outstretched hand. Her mouth opened and closed but no words emerged.

"You can do this," he urged, dropping the letter to her lap.

"I… I can't," she whispered, her voice cracking. "I can't read this!"

"You can," he insisted. "You can and you will. Come on, Granger; you're Gryffindor for a reason."

Hermione continued to eye the envelope as though it would explode in her hold. Slowly, she ran an index finger along the stiff edge and bent the corner slightly. She worried her bottom lip fretfully between her teeth and eventually let out a long, deep breath, taking the envelope in hand and ripping it open.

Tears began to fall when she removed a Muggle birthday card. Bright blue, with a black and white cartoon dog and yellow bird wearing pointed, coloured hats and dancing. She gave a tremulous little laugh when she opened the card and two sheets of pale yellow paper fell out.

He gave her leave when she unfolded the first piece of paper and began to cry.

**-XXX-**

"Why did you go to war?"

"Hmm?"

"You said a few weeks ago that you had thoughts of leaving the Wizarding world when you were in fifth year. I've been pondering; you must have thought something of it was worth saving if you stayed to fight."

"I stayed for Harry. Heaven knows he needed all the help he could get."

"Potter had a whole bleeding cavalry ready to do his bidding, Granger."

"So I'm not allowed to help my best friend while he brings down a madman dictator? Sorry, Malfoy, I didn't know there was any etiquette to adhere to in that situation. Probably another one of those asinine pure-blood traditions no one deigned to warn me about."

He nearly smiled at her acerbic wit. "All I'm saying is that if you had truly planned on leaving for so long, you could have."

Her eyes flashed and her nostrils flared. "Are you suggesting that my input during the war was useless, Malfoy?"

"Not at all. I'm merely saying that had you wanted to leave, you very well could have. Which makes me think, you must have had something else you were fighting for."

"Is Harry not a good enough reason? I know the very concept of having a friend must be exceedingly foreign to you, but believe me, Harry being safe was well worth everything."

"Your loyalty is admirable," he placated her, "and far better than I could ever hope for myself. But let's try something different; Potter is who you fought with, not for. So, that in mind, what were you fighting for?"

Hermione opened her mouth as though to say something, but quickly closed it again.

"What were you fighting for, Granger, if not for your place in this world?"

"I… what are you talking about?"

"Why did you follow Potter on some old fool's quest that would never have succeeded without a healthy dose of dumb luck? Why didn't you allow yourself to give everything away when my crazed bitch aunt had you under her wand? Why did you break out of the most secure bank in all the Wizarding world on the back of a bloody dragon? Why, Granger? Why would you do these things if you didn't want to better this world, to live in this world?"

"I fought for Harry," she repeated weakly.

"Think about what you were fighting against, then; not what you were fighting for!" Draco snapped. "Think about everything Voldemort stood for, and what you helped stop. Think about the lives you saved. You fought for your place in the Wizarding world, for the place of all Muggle-borns and fuck it all, you won it, Granger! You just never stuck around long enough to see it!

"Your parents, yes," he went on after she didn't reply, "that is a raw fucking deal if ever I've heard one, but do you honestly believe this is what they wanted? They didn't send you away thinking you'd do this! They sent you away thinking you'd swan back into the Wizarding world and not look back! Not that you'd hole yourself up in squalor not even an animal would deserve!

"You want to know a theory, Granger?" he goaded. "I don't think you're depressed because of the Wizarding world, I think you're depressed because you made yourself leave it."

"Stop it," she whispered, tears streaking down her cheeks. "Stop it, Malfoy, please!"

"The world has changed," he continued, far gentler than before. "_You_ changed the world, and Granger? You need to see it." She sniffed, and he gave in to the urge to brush her tears away with his thumb. He cradled her cheek in his hand, and she leaned into his touch. "Let me show you."

"I don't know if I can," she whispered.

"I'm not asking you to be better right now," he implored softly. "And I'm not asking you to change overnight. I'm just asking you to come with me."

"Why?" she whispered, exhausted. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because it's important. Now, please, let's go outside."

"Important for who?" she questioned. "You could leave now and no one would ever know."

"Potter will keep coming back, regardless of whether I stop or not. Your wish to slip away from the world unnoticed isn't going to come true."

"Maybe so, but why _you_? You have nothing to gain by coming here."

"My motives are my own," he replied testily.

"Why the hell are you trying so damn hard?" she cried. "I can't… I don't get it, Malfoy! Why are you here? I don't understand and it's been driving me insane ever since you walked through my door! I can't keep letting you in without knowing why, so please, Malfoy! Please tell me why!"

"Because I fucking love you!" he bellowed. "Merlin knows why, but I love you, Granger, have done for longer than I care to admit, and seeing you like this…" He paused and took a deep breath. "Fucking hell, Granger, it's killing me."

"You… you what?" Hermione whispered.

"You heard what I said." He chuckled bitterly. "Hell, the whole building probably heard me."

"Is that why you've been trying so hard? Why you kept coming back even after I told you not to?"

"I wouldn't be doing this for just anyone, Granger."

"I don't even…" She fell back against her pillows, chewing her bottom lip. "I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything. I didn't say it for a reply." He let out a long, deep breath, and ran a hand through his hair. "You wanted the truth, so there it is."

"When?"

"Not now," he warned.

"Yes, now, Malfoy! You don't spring that on someone and not expect them to have questions!"

"No, I don't spring that on _you_ and not expect you to have questions. Anyone else would have dealt with it."

"Maybe so, but I'm not anyone else," she said in a prim and snotty tone that harked back to her eleven-year-old self. "So, tell me, just when did you –"

"Merlin's balls, Granger, for the love of all that is good in the world, will you please come outside with me? I promise, if you do, I'll answer every single one of your asinine questions."

She paused, looking at him with wary eyes. "Outside?"

He gave a small smile. "It's about time, Granger. Don't you think?"

A single tear travelled slowly down her cheek to her pointed chin where it fell to her clenched hands. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath and, to Draco's absolute astonishment, for he hadn't seen her do this yet, she pulled her legs out from under the blankets and set her feet on the floor.

Throwing the blankets to the side, and revealing the extent of her bony frame, she stood on shaky legs and took two slow steps towards him. He braced his hands on her narrow waist, keeping her swaying body upright. Her small hands crawled up his biceps and clutched tightly.

"I'm alright," she reassured him. "I just got up too fast."

He studied her closely, and saw a glint of familiar determination in her eye. "Are you certain?" he asked.

She swallowed and took a deep breath. "I am," she whispered.

She broke away from him and stared resolutely at her door. Her steps forward were tentative and unsteady, but he couldn't be prouder. She reached her front door unassisted, but stumbled on her weak legs like a foal once she reached the hallway. Draco wrapped one arm around her waist for support while the other took her hand. She squeezed as tight as she could manage in thanks.

They inched forward, ignoring the curious looks of those watching them, stopping in front of the glass doors that led outside. Hermione looked on, her hand trembling in his.

"Are you certain?" he asked again.

She nodded, though it wasn't without hesitance. "You're right. It is time."

"Alright." He let go of her hand and stepped back. "This is for you, Granger. Open the door."

Hermione drew in several deep, calming breaths in and out, and reached her shaking hand out to the door. "When we get out there, Malfoy," - she turned to look at him, her hand poised on the door handle - "I want to know exactly why you kissed me when I was petrified."

And with that, she turned the handle, and stepped out into the sunlight.

* * *

**AN: **And there you have it! For those who are disappointed by the length (or lack of) and the ambiguity, I remind you that this was written for a fest, and under a deadline, so obviously it's not as detailed as I or you would have liked. However, I am open to the idea of a continuation of this story one day, however I doubt it'll be for a while yet, possibly some time next year.

Thanks for reading this one, and a reminder that reviews are much appreciated. More so than pizza. And I love pizza.


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